shipkit-why-project

A project-vision skill that creates a strategic overview of who a project serves, the problem it solves, its direction, and its boundaries.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when starting or clarifying a project. It helps define the audience, core problem, goals, constraints, and work that is explicitly out of scope.
Why use it?
It turns scattered project information into shared direction before detailed product and engineering decisions are made.

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/stefan-stepzero/shipkit/shipkit-why-project
Any agent
npx skills add stefan-stepzero/shipkit --skill shipkit-why-project
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/stefan-stepzero/shipkit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 37 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,488 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 $0.00037 $0.03488
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.01744
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00698
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00349

Measured 2d ago against content hash 03907ee8d561, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

shipkit-why-project 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.

install/skills/shipkit-why-project/SKILL.md · 318 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 318 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

shipkit-why-project - Project Vision & Strategy

Purpose: Create a strategic overview that answers: Who is this for? What problem does it solve? Where are we? Where are we going? How are we getting there? What are we NOT building?

What it does: Collects core vision inputs, generates .shipkit/why.json, provides strategic context for all future sessions.

Protocol: This skill follows the canonical elicitation protocol defined in install/shared/references/elicitation-protocol.md (the mechanics — marker, state files, resume). The steps below are this skill's specific application of that protocol.

Calibration: Apply install/shared/references/ground-or-ask-calibration.md (the intelligence — propose vs ask). Ground first: propose every vision field you can tie to a cited signal (the opening prompt, README, codebase, package.json), tagged with its source; flag low-leverage guesses as guessed. Only the genuinely-unknown high-leverage fields (who it's for, the core problem, the one-way-door constraints) become NEEDS_ELICITATION questions. Do not ask what a signal already answers; do not silently invent a high-leverage field. Runs autonomous (propose + few questions) by default; interactive when signals are thin.


When to Invoke

User triggers:

  • "Define the project vision"
  • "Why are we building this?"
  • "What's this project about?"
  • "Create project overview"

Auto-suggested: Session start if why.json doesn't exist (via shipkit-session-start.py)


Prerequisites

None - This can be the first skill you run (even before shipkit-project-context)

Recommended order:

  1. /shipkit-why-project - Define strategic vision
  2. /shipkit-stage - Set project stage, constraints, and business metrics
  3. /shipkit-product-discovery - Define personas & user needs
  4. /shipkit-product-definition - Design solution blueprint
  5. /shipkit-product-goals - Define user-outcome success criteria (P-*)

Process

Step 0: Context Shortcut

Read the full file on GitHub · 318 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 · 318 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A 03907ee8d561

Subscribe to this mod's changes

shipkit-why-project is a skill published in the GitHub repository stefan-stepzero/shipkit (1 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 3,488 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.