task-system

A system for running work in the background while the main coding conversation continues. Each task has a status and saves its output to a file.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to start, track, inspect, or stop background work such as test suites, compilation, large checkouts, and long-running workflows.
Why use it?
It prevents long operations such as tests, builds, repository cloning, or workflows from blocking the conversation. Results can remain available after the session restarts.

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/techymt/claude-code-superpowers/task-system
Any agent
npx skills add TechyMT/claude-code-superpowers --skill task-system
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TechyMT/claude-code-superpowers

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 97 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,885 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 $0.00097 $0.01885
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.00942
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00377
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00188

Measured yesterday against content hash f1b7cb0c75ac, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

task-system 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 yesterday.

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/task-system/SKILL.md · 192 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 192 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Task System

The pattern

A Task is a unit of background work that runs independently of the main conversation loop. Tasks are spawned by tools or commands, tracked in AppState.tasks by ID, write their output to a disk file (not memory), and progress through a lifecycle: pending → running → completed | failed | killed.

The key design: tasks do not block the conversation. After a task is spawned, the LLM can continue the conversation, ask the user for more input, or respond to the task's output when it's done. The user can check task status with /tasks, kill a task with /tasks kill, or watch its output live.

Why this matters

Some operations take seconds to minutes: running a test suite, compiling a large project, cloning a repository, running a long Temporal workflow. If these blocked the conversation loop, the user would be stuck waiting. The Task system decouples the spawn from the wait.

Disk-backed output (each task writes to a temp file, tracked by outputFile + outputOffset) is a deliberate choice over in-memory buffers. It means: (1) output is preserved across session restarts; (2) the output file can be tail -f'd externally; (3) the main process doesn't hold all output in memory; (4) partial output can be read back at any offset without re-running the task.

How to apply it

  1. To spawn a task: use the TaskCreateTool from the tool registry. It accepts a type, description, and type-specific configuration. The tool returns a taskId.
  2. The task lifecycle is managed by the task runner for its type (e.g., LocalAgentTask, LocalShellTask). Don't manage it manually.
  3. To read task status: use context.getAppState().tasks[taskId] — it returns a TaskStateBase with status, outputFile, outputOffset, and timing.
  4. To kill a task: use TaskStopTool with the taskId.
  5. To stream output: read from outputFile starting at outputOffset — increment the offset with each read.
  6. When the task completes, set endTime and update status to 'completed' or 'failed' via setAppState.

Read the full file on GitHub · 192 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. yesterday First seen · 192 lines · 97 tokens per session scan A f1b7cb0c75ac

Subscribe to this mod's changes

task-system is a skill published in the GitHub repository TechyMT/claude-code-superpowers (5 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 97 tokens to every session and 1,885 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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