journal

journal is a skill for Claude Code from stellarshenson/claude-code-plugins. It costs 134 tokens per session (3,133 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A project journal manager for maintaining `.claude/JOURNAL.md`, an append-only record of substantive work. It also checks that the supporting command-line toolkit is installed and current before use.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to add, update, archive, or inspect project journal entries and to record decisions or other substantive task work.
Why use it?
It keeps a chronological audit trail of project activity and avoids running journal commands with an outdated or unavailable toolkit.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions .claude-plugin; names the AskUserQuestion tool.

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 journal plugin — 5 skills, 4 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it to add, update, archive, or inspect project journal entries and to record decisions or other substantive task work.

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 stellarshenson/claude-code-plugins
Claude Code
/plugin install journal

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install journal, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills, 4 commands.

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 journal

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/stellarshenson/claude-code-plugins/journal/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/stellarshenson/claude-code-plugins/journal)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/stellarshenson/claude-code-plugins/journal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/stellarshenson/claude-code-plugins/journal/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 journal

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/stellarshenson/claude-code-plugins/journal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/stellarshenson/claude-code-plugins/journal.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 134 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,133 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 $0.00134 $0.03133
Opus 5.5 $0.00054 $0.01253
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00027 $0.00627
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00313

Measured 3d ago against content hash 972ad3d1a0f4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

journal 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 3d 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.

plugins/journal/skills/journal/SKILL.md · 190 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 190 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Journal

Project audit trail. Every substantive task = one entry. Append at END. Last entry = newest.

Pre-flight install (MANDATORY - run every session, no asking)

Always run this single line BEFORE invoking any journal-tools subcommand. The upgrade always runs - a stale-but-importable install is exactly the failure this gate prevents, and the reinstall also repairs a stale shim on PATH whose package is uninstalled in the active Python:

python3 -m pip install --user --upgrade stellars-claude-code-plugins 2>&1 | tail -1
LIB=$(python3 -c "import importlib.metadata as m;print(m.version('stellars-claude-code-plugins'))" 2>/dev/null) || { echo "FATAL: toolkit unavailable"; exit 1; }
PLUG=$(grep -m1 '"version"' "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/.claude-plugin/plugin.json" 2>/dev/null | cut -d'"' -f4)
OLDER=$(printf '%s\n%s\n' "$LIB" "$PLUG" | sort -V | head -1)
[ -n "$PLUG" ] && [ "$LIB" != "$PLUG" ] && [ "$OLDER" = "$LIB" ] && { echo "STALE: library $LIB older than plugin $PLUG - refusing to run on an outdated CLI; re-run the upgrade"; exit 1; }
echo "toolkit $LIB"

Run the CLI without touching the caller's project. The gate above puts it on PATH, so the bare command name is the whole invocation. uv run instead resolves whatever project the working directory sits in and writes uv.lock and .venv into it, so if you reach for uv pass --no-project (uv run --no-project <cli> ...) - it skips project discovery, leaves the tree untouched and still finds the same PATH binary. --no-sync and --frozen are not substitutes; both still create .venv.

Ships journal-tools CLI (check, sort, archive, layout, standardize). Verify: journal-tools --help. Never skip this step. Never ask the user whether to install - just run the line.

Commands

Command Use
/journal:create INIT empty journal. Backfill from conversation context. Refuses if file exists.
/journal:update DEFAULT. Append new entry. Extend last entry only if same task, pre-release.
/journal:archive Move old entries to JOURNAL_ARCHIVE.md. Triggered >40 entries.
/journal:standardize REPAIR. For each entry the validator warned on (over Standard target, over Extended max, or false-advertising marker), a focused claude -p subprocess decides Extended vs Condense vs Drop-marker; the CLI applies it. Use after journal-tools check reports word-count warnings - never inline-edit oversized entries by hand.
/journal:article EXTRACT. For entries over the Extended max (>400 words), pull the depth into a standalone article under docs/ and condense the entry to a Standard-tier summary linking to the article. Asks the user for title / location / scope / summary length via AskUserQuestion.

Read the full file on GitHub · 190 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. 3d ago Changed · +8 lines 972ad3d1a0f4
  2. 1mo ago Changed 9ce0af749f3c
  3. 1mo ago First seen · 182 lines · 134 tokens per session scan A f4f83f35f662

Subscribe to this mod's changes

journal is a skill published in the GitHub repository stellarshenson/claude-code-plugins (4 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 134 tokens to every session and 3,133 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-09-05.