project-context

A per-project setup guide for keeping environment details, secrets, and run snapshots in a private project directory. It separates this runtime information from large experiment files and source control.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to prepare a project before experiments or evaluations, fill in missing paths or credentials, save reproducible run snapshots, and configure shared-memory access.
Why use it?
It prevents repeated environment setup and helps keep API keys and other local configuration out of the project's Git history.

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/tenureai/phd-zero/project-context
Any agent
npx skills add TenureAI/PhD-Zero --skill project-context
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TenureAI/PhD-Zero

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 93 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 999 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 $0.00093 $0.00999
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.00500
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00200
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00100

Measured yesterday against content hash 67083e9f570c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

project-context 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/project_context.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/project-context/SKILL.md · 125 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 125 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Project Context

Mission

Provide a reusable, private-by-default context layer for each project so environment information is collected once, reused across runs, and safely isolated from git history.

Scope boundary:

  1. manages runtime context and secrets only
  2. does not store heavy experiment artifacts (checkpoints, dataset caches, large logs)
  3. stores per-project shared-memory source configuration, but not shared-memory records

Trigger

Use this skill when any of these are needed:

  1. first-time project environment bootstrap
  2. preflight checks before experiment/report/eval execution
  3. missing runtime fields during task execution
  4. per-run context snapshot for reproducibility
  5. first use of shared-memory retrieval or export for a project

Private Directory Contract

Store all local runtime state under project root:

  • <project-root>/.project_local/<project_slug>/context.json
  • <project-root>/.project_local/<project_slug>/secrets.json
  • <project-root>/.project_local/<project_slug>/runs/<run_id>/runtime_snapshot.json

Rules:

  1. .project_local/ must be in .gitignore.
  2. context.json is non-sensitive.
  3. secrets.json is sensitive and must never be logged verbatim.
  4. If multiple projects share one orchestration repo, isolate by project_slug.
  5. Initialize .gitignore if missing and append .project_local/ if absent.

Incremental Collection Policy

Do not ask for all fields at once.

  1. infer task type (report|sft|rl|eval|generic)
  2. load existing context.json + secrets.json
  3. auto-detect non-sensitive environment values where possible
  4. if execution target is remote, consume reuse decision from run-governor first; ask only if decision is missing
  5. ask only for missing required fields for the current task
  6. during execution, allow blocker-only delta prompts (e.g. missing API URL/key)
  7. persist immediately for reuse
  8. when shared-memory retrieval/export is needed, ask the user where the local shared-memory repo should live if memory.shared_repo.path is missing

Read the full file on GitHub · 125 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. yesterday First seen · 125 lines · 93 tokens per session scan A 67083e9f570c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

project-context is a skill published in the GitHub repository TenureAI/PhD-Zero (52 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 93 tokens to every session and 999 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 2026-08-30.

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