setup

A first-run setup guide for configuring the Citadel harness in a new project. It installs hooks, detects the project’s technology stack, creates configuration, and can demonstrate the system on real code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when starting Citadel in a new project, choosing a guided or express setup, restoring an existing archive, and creating the project’s planning files.
Why use it?
It turns an unconfigured project into a working harness without requiring the user to know the setup sequence.

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/sethgammon/citadel/setup
Any agent
npx skills add SethGammon/Citadel --skill setup
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/SethGammon/Citadel

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 69 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,324 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 $0.00069 $0.04324
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.02162
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00865
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00432

Measured 2d ago against content hash a989aa29490e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

setup 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 2d ago.

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/setup/SKILL.md · 308 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 308 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/do setup — First-Run Experience

Configures the harness for a specific project: installs hooks, detects stack, writes harness.json, and optionally demos the system on real code. Flag: /do setup --express skips mode selection and runs Express directly. Reference tables and layouts: docs/SETUP_REFERENCE.md.

Orientation

Use when: first-run configuration of Citadel on a new project -- installs hooks, generates harness.json, scaffolds .planning/. Don't use when: harness is already configured and you want to verify it (use /verify); adding a single skill to an existing project (copy SKILL.md manually).

Protocol

Step -1: ARCHIVE DETECTION (all modes, before anything else)

Run ls docs/citadel/ 2>/dev/null. If docs/citadel/ exists and contains .md files with citadel-archive: true in frontmatter, extract the exported-at date and prompt once:

Found a Citadel archive from {exported-at date}.
  Campaigns: {N}  Postmortems: {N}  Backlog items: {N}  Research: {N}

Restore history into .planning/ during setup? [Y/n]

Y or Enter → set restoreArchive = true, restore after Step 1 (below). n → skip silently. No archive found → skip entirely, no output.

ARCHIVE RESTORE (runs after Step 1 if restoreArchive = true). Splitting: each ## Section Title becomes one restored file; strip frontmatter before writing.

File Restore to
campaigns.md Split sections → .planning/campaigns/completed/{name}.md
postmortems.md Split sections → .planning/postmortems/{name}.md
research.md Split sections → .planning/research/{name}.md
backlog.md Split sections → .planning/intake/{name}.md
discoveries.md Split sections → .planning/discoveries/{name}.md
project.md Strip frontmatter → .citadel/project.md
harness.json.md Strip frontmatter → .claude/harness.json

After restore: ✓ Archive restored — {N} campaigns, {N} postmortems, {N} backlog items

Step 0: MODE SELECTION

Read the full file on GitHub · 308 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 2d ago First seen · 308 lines · 69 tokens per session scan A a989aa29490e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

setup is a skill published in the GitHub repository SethGammon/Citadel (914 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 69 tokens to every session and 4,324 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-30.

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