git-recon

git-recon is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Smirnov-Labs/claude-skills. It costs 99 tokens per session (2,156 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A skill for checking the health of a repository by examining its Git history before reading the code. A repository is the project’s tracked files and their change history.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it during onboarding, handoffs, acquisition checks, or refactoring plans to find likely trouble areas in a repository’s recent history.
Why use it?
It helps reveal concentrated risk, ownership patterns, and periods of frequent fixes when you are new to an inherited or unfamiliar codebase.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Good fit Use it during onboarding, handoffs, acquisition checks, or refactoring plans to find likely trouble areas in a repository’s recent history.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/smirnov-labs/claude-skills/git-recon
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.

Any agent
npx skills add Smirnov-Labs/claude-skills --skill git-recon
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Smirnov-Labs/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Its marketplace also offers this one on its own, as the plugin git-recon/plugin install git-recon after adding the marketplace above.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for git-recon

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/smirnov-labs/claude-skills/git-recon/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/smirnov-labs/claude-skills/git-recon)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/smirnov-labs/claude-skills/git-recon"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/smirnov-labs/claude-skills/git-recon/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for git-recon

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/smirnov-labs/claude-skills/git-recon"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/smirnov-labs/claude-skills/git-recon.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 99 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,156 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00099 $0.02156
Opus 5 $0.00049 $0.01078
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00431
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00216

Measured 11d ago against content hash ad50501ed1d6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

git-recon 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 11d 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/git-recon/SKILL.md · 146 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 146 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Git Recon

Before reading code, read the git history. Five commands reveal where risk concentrates, who owns what, and whether the team is shipping or firefighting. Based on Piechowski's "5 git commands before reading code" (https://piechowski.io/post/git-commands-before-reading-code/).

When to Use

  • Onboarding to an unfamiliar or inherited codebase
  • Due diligence on an acquisition or handoff
  • Planning a refactor and needing to locate risk
  • User asks "what's the state of this repo?" or "where are the landmines?"

Prerequisites

Run from inside a git repository on the branch the user cares about (usually default). If any check fails, stop and ask the user.

git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree   # must print true
git rev-parse --is-shallow-repository  # must print false — shallow clones distort all probes
git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD        # confirm branch scope in the report

Horizon: all probes use a single 12-month window for comparability. If the user wants a different window, override SINCE everywhere, don't mix.

SINCE="1 year ago"

Pipeline

Run all five probes (in parallel when possible), then synthesize. Do not just dump command output — the value is in the cross-referencing.

1. High-Churn Files — where change concentrates

git log --no-merges --since="$SINCE" --format=format: --name-only \
  | grep -v '^$' \
  | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20

Top 20 most-modified files in the last 12 months. Files that change constantly are risky: unpredictable blast radius, likely god-objects or missing abstractions.

Caveat — renames: this command is not rename-aware. A file renamed mid-window splits its churn across old and new paths. When drilling into a specific top file, rerun with git log --follow --no-merges --since="$SINCE" -- <path> to see true lifetime churn.

Read the full file on GitHub · 146 lines

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. 11d ago First seen · 146 lines · 99 tokens per session scan A ad50501ed1d6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

git-recon is a skill published in the GitHub repository Smirnov-Labs/claude-skills (5 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 99 tokens to every session and 2,156 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.

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