init

A conversational setup helper for MANUSCRIPT_STATE.yaml, a shared configuration file describing a manuscript and its editorial goals. It gathers details from the files and asks the author about information the files cannot reveal.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to initialize or complete Scriptorium for a manuscript, including its title, sections, bibliography locations, main claims, known weaknesses, terminology, and audience.
Why use it?
It reduces manual setup and helps ensure the shared manuscript information is complete and valid before other tools use it.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/seandavi/scriptorium/init
Any agent
npx skills add seandavi/scriptorium --skill init
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/seandavi/scriptorium

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 99 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,176 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00099 $0.04176
Opus 5 $0.00049 $0.02088
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00835
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00418

Measured yesterday against content hash 870961fe1a80, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

init scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/init/SKILL.md · 382 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 382 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

init: conversational MANUSCRIPT_STATE.yaml bootstrap

You are running scriptorium's init skill. Your job is to walk an author through populating MANUSCRIPT_STATE.yaml — the shared editorial state every scriptorium skill reads. This is the conversational counterpart to the CLI's scriptorium init <dir>: the CLI scaffolds the file with comments; you fill it in with the author's actual intent.

Invocation discipline

Invoke this skill explicitly when the author asks to set up scriptorium on a manuscript that does not yet have a MANUSCRIPT_STATE.yaml, or has only a partial one. Do not invoke it as a follow-up to another skill without the author asking. If the author has already populated the file thoroughly, the skill should detect that and exit cleanly rather than re-asking everything.

Critical constraints — read before doing anything else

  1. Never invent fields not in the schema. The canonical schema is schemas/manuscript-state.schema.json in the scriptorium install (also bundled with the plugin). Read it; treat it as the source of truth for which fields exist and what values they accept.
  2. Never silently overwrite existing values. If core_claims already has three entries, do not propose four new ones. Ask whether to add to, replace, or leave the existing list.
  3. Always validate before writing. Run scriptorium validate against the proposed file content (or run the schema check in-band) before persisting. Surface validation errors as conversational prompts, not as failures.
  4. Be skippable at every stage. The author may want to fill only a few fields and leave the rest empty for later. Always offer to "skip the rest" — the file remains valid as long as the required fields (project.title, project.target_type, document_phase.current) are present.
  5. Preserve template comments for empty fields. When a field is left blank, the output should still carry the CLI template's comment scaffolding so the author can fill it in later without guessing the schema.

Read the full file on GitHub · 382 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 382 lines · 99 tokens per session scan A 870961fe1a80

Subscribe to this mod's changes

init is a skill published in the GitHub repository seandavi/scriptorium (3 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 99 tokens to every session and 4,176 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

skillpack-creator

Create a reusable SkillPack from a successful completed task. Use when the user wants to convert a one-off research, coding, analysis, or content workflow into a distributable local SkillPack with skillpack.json, local skills under skills/, starter prompts, start scripts, and an optional zip package.

CreminiAI/skillpack · 67 tokens

skill-creator

Create new skills, modify and improve existing skills, and measure skill performance. Use when users want to create a skill from scratch, edit, or optimize an existing skill, run evals to test a skill, benchmark skill performance with variance analysis, or optimize a skill's description for better triggering accuracy.

CreminiAI/skillpack · 64 tokens

super-design

Use when the user asks you to build, style, theme, refine, audit, or recreate UI — or uploads a screenshot to rebuild. Reads DESIGN.md as a closed token layer, detects the project's framework (Tailwind v4/v3, ShadCN, MUI, Radix, Geist), and enforces production design rules (tokens only, full state matrix, WCAG 2.2 AA…

Eldergenix/SUPER-DESIGN · 122 tokens

deep-modules

Measures module depth: whether the interface is simple relative to the implementation behind it. Use when an interface has too many parameters or methods, many small classes each do too little, or methods just forward calls. Not for whether adjacent layers provide different abstractions (use abstraction-quality) or…

codybrom/clairvoyance · 71 tokens

red-flags

Scans code against 17 design smells (the book's 14 named Red Flags plus 3 process-stage signals) and produces a structured diagnostic report. Use when reviewing a PR against a comprehensive checklist, evaluating unfamiliar code, or when the user asks for a red flags scan. Not for diagnosing why code feels complex (use…

codybrom/clairvoyance · 86 tokens

comments-docs

Reviews comment quality and documentation practices: the four comment types, comments-first workflow, and comment rot. Use when reviewing comments or docs, when comments just repeat the code, or when something is hard to describe in a sentence. Not for naming or code obviousness (use naming-obviousness).

codybrom/clairvoyance · 63 tokens