update-refs

update-refs is a skill for Claude Code from spinningrachel/career-engine. It costs 136 tokens per session (3,396 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A maintenance workflow for updating the reference files used by career-writing tools. These files contain the user's background, writing rules, framework, profile, preferences, and delivered application letters.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when adding or replacing career materials such as a CV, testimonial, framework, role facts, portfolio item, or writing guidance.
Why use it?
It keeps future career documents grounded in current personal information instead of outdated or invented details. Changes to these references can affect every later application.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; names the TodoWrite tool; mentions Claude Code.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the career-engine plugin — 29 skills, 16 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it when adding or replacing career materials such as a CV, testimonial, framework, role facts, portfolio item, or writing guidance.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add spinningrachel/career-engine
Claude Code
/plugin install career-engine

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install career-engine, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 29 skills, 16 agents, 1 hook.

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 update-refs

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/spinningrachel/career-engine/update-refs.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/spinningrachel/career-engine/update-refs)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/spinningrachel/career-engine/update-refs"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/spinningrachel/career-engine/update-refs.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 136 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,396 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 $0.00136 $0.03396
Opus 5 $0.00068 $0.01698
Sonnet 5 $0.00027 $0.00679
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00340

Measured 7d ago against content hash 2c1186c624db, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

update-refs 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 7d 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/update-refs/SKILL.md · 128 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 128 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Update References — User-Initiated Reference Maintenance

You are maintaining the reference files that every career-engine agent writes from. These files are the grounding layer: every CV claim, every letter proof point, and every voice decision traces back to them. A careless write here propagates into every future application. Precision beats speed; asking beats assuming.

career-data data root (R-37). The personal-data files — 01-writing-rules.md, 02-professional-background.md, 03-framework.md, linkedin-profile.md, pipeline-preferences.json, delivered-letters/, and the user's .dotx — load from ${CAREER_DATA}/references/, the path the orchestrator resolves in its career-data discovery preflight. Every other file (self-checks, REFERENCES.md, skill docs, default .dotx templates) stays on ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}. If ${CAREER_DATA} is not set (direct or standalone invocation outside the orchestrator), locate the career-data skill yourself, confirm career-data-marker.json, and apply the orchestrator's healthy / damaged / absent outcomes before reading. A configured user's missing career-data is a hard stop — never silently fall back to blank templates.

Writing personal data (R-37). Every reference target in the map below lives in ${CAREER_DATA}/references/..., not in the plugin. Apply the orchestrator's Writing personal data rule: in Claude Code, write the career-data files directly; in Cowork, stage the change to the output folder and emit the Appendix-A handoff (${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/references/career-data-skill-handoff.md) for the user to apply in Chat — never write a divergent copy. Refresh the career-data backup export after a direct write.

Scope: this skill handles materials the user brings to you — updated CVs, new testimonials, portfolio items, changed role facts, positioning documents, voice samples, new reference documents. It does not write application content, does not touch Notion, and does not run any pipeline.


─── THE PRIME RULE — NEVER ASSUME ───

When anything about an item is ambiguous — what it is, where it belongs, whether it updates or replaces existing content, or how a new file should be used — stop and ask the user. Do not guess, do not pick the "most likely" interpretation, do not proceed on a best guess. Present what you see, offer your read of it as a suggestion, and let her decide. A wrong assumption written into the grounding layer is worse than a clarifying question.


Read the full file on GitHub · 128 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. 7d ago First seen · 128 lines · 136 tokens per session scan A 2c1186c624db

Subscribe to this mod's changes

update-refs is a skill published in the GitHub repository spinningrachel/career-engine (4 stars, last pushed 26d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 136 tokens to every session and 3,396 once invoked, about $0.0007 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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