brief

brief is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from t0ddharris/claude-code-skills. It costs 24 tokens per session (783 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of rules for taking a software task through separate stages: writing the specification, planning, coding, and reviewing. A shared task file records the stage, requirements, and acceptance checks.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to manage feature work, debugging, reviews, pausing and resuming tasks, and the handoff from a request to a completed change.
Why use it?
It prevents non-trivial work from becoming an untracked sequence of edits and keeps decisions and progress available across sessions.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; installed under .agents/ (shared by several agents).

Good fit Use it to manage feature work, debugging, reviews, pausing and resuming tasks, and the handoff from a request to a completed change.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/t0ddharris/claude-code-skills/brief
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 t0ddharris/claude-code-skills --skill brief
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/t0ddharris/claude-code-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 brief

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/t0ddharris/claude-code-skills/brief.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/t0ddharris/claude-code-skills/brief)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/t0ddharris/claude-code-skills/brief"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/t0ddharris/claude-code-skills/brief.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 24 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 783 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 $0.00024 $0.00783
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.00392
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00157
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00078

Measured 7d ago against content hash 6399d6e0c874, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

brief 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.

.agents/skills/brief/SKILL.md · 75 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 75 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Session Brief

Run this at the end of a session to capture context and checkpoint all work to GitHub.

Steps

1. Review Existing Brief

Read brief/session-brief.md to understand what was there from last session.

2. Write the New Brief

Overwrite brief/session-brief.md with a comprehensive brief covering:

  • Date, time, and session number at the top — run date "+%A %Y-%m-%d %H:%M %Z" to get the real date, day of week, and local timezone rather than guessing (LLMs are unreliable at computing the day of the week, especially for future dates)
  • Important progress made in the current session
  • Key decisions and architectural changes
  • Unfinished tasks and next steps
  • Technical details that need to be preserved
  • Any context that would be lost between sessions

This is NOT about brevity — be as thorough as needed to retain all important context.

2.5. Reflect on Skills

After writing the brief, run the reflect skill to scan the conversation for learnings. This is a delegation, not a repeat of the reflect instructions. Load and follow the reflect skill.

  • If learnings are found: present them to the user alongside the brief, before asking about git
  • If no learnings: report "no new skill learnings detected" in one line and continue to Step 3
  • Any approved skill updates will be committed together with the brief in Step 4

2.7. Sync Skills (opt-in projects only)

If the project has an .agents/ directory, run the sync-skills skill with project scope (no prompt) so .agents/skills/ mirrors .claude/skills/ before committing. Only mention it if something was added or removed. If there is no .agents/ directory, skip silently — never create one.

3. Ask About Git

After writing the brief, always ask the user which option they want:

  1. Commit + push — full checkpoint to GitHub
  2. Commit only — local save point, push later
  3. Brief only — just the file update, no git operations

Present these as a quick choice. Do NOT assume commit+push.

Read the full file on GitHub · 75 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 · 75 lines · 24 tokens per session scan A 6399d6e0c874

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brief is a skill published in the GitHub repository t0ddharris/claude-code-skills (2 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 24 tokens to every session and 783 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.