contributor-experience

contributor-experience is a skill for Claude Code from the-open-agent/oss-skills. It costs 101 tokens per session (2,088 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A set of practices for making it easy for new contributors to set up a project and submit their first change.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps improve CONTRIBUTING.md, create a working development setup, guide people from cloning the repository to passing tests, and improve the path to a reviewed pull request.
Why use it?
It removes common obstacles such as unclear tasks, broken setup instructions, confusing test failures, and intimidating contribution rules.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the oss-skills plugin — 18 skills shipped together

Good fit It helps improve CONTRIBUTING.md, create a working development setup, guide people from cloning the repository to passing tests, and improve the path to a reviewed pull request.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/contributor-experience
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 the-open-agent/oss-skills --skill contributor-experience
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/the-open-agent/oss-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install oss-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 18 skills.

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 contributor-experience

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/contributor-experience/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/contributor-experience)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/contributor-experience"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/contributor-experience/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 contributor-experience

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/contributor-experience"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/contributor-experience.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 101 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,088 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 $0.00101 $0.02088
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.01044
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00418
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00209

Measured 9d ago against content hash d937149899d1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

contributor-experience 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 9d 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.

skills/contributor-experience/SKILL.md · 201 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 201 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Contributor Experience

Contributors are not recruited; they are unblocked. Almost everyone who could contribute to your project already wanted to at some point and hit a wall. Find the wall.

The funnel

Each step loses most of the people at the previous one. Fix the leakiest step, not your favorite one.

Uses the project        1000
Hits a bug/limitation    200
Considers fixing it       50   ← lost to: no clear entry point, unclear scope
Clones and sets up        20   ← lost to: setup fails on their machine  ★ biggest leak
Makes the change           8   ← lost to: can't find where, tests fail confusingly
Opens a PR                 5   ← lost to: process anxiety, CLA friction
Gets it merged             3   ← lost to: slow review, endless nits
Contributes again          1   ← lost to: no acknowledgment

The largest single leak in most projects is setup. It is also the cheapest to fix and the least glamorous, which is why it stays broken.

Setup that works on the first try

Target: git clone → working dev environment → passing tests, in under 10 minutes, with one command, on macOS, Linux, and Windows.

git clone https://github.com/owner/repo && cd repo
make setup     # installs deps, sets up hooks, seeds fixtures
make test      # passes

Verify it the only way that works: on a clean machine, or better, a container. Your laptop has fifteen things installed that you have forgotten about.

docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD:/w" -w /w node:22 sh -c 'make setup && make test'

Better still, ship a devcontainer (.devcontainer/devcontainer.json) or a Nix flake so "works on my machine" stops being a category of problem. GitHub Codespaces then gives contributors a zero-install path, which converts drive-by fixers who will never configure a local toolchain for a one-line change.

Windows deserves explicit attention: it is where setup silently fails and where you will never see the person who gave up. Test it, or say clearly in CONTRIBUTING.md that WSL is required.

Read the full file on GitHub · 201 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. 9d ago First seen · 201 lines · 101 tokens per session scan A d937149899d1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

contributor-experience is a skill published in the GitHub repository the-open-agent/oss-skills (5 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 101 tokens to every session and 2,088 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.