start

start is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from TimothyHan/qa-buddy-skills. It costs 109 tokens per session (1,915 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A guided quality-assurance workflow for a new software feature or epic, meaning a larger piece of planned work. It coordinates a test plan, ticket reviews, and test-case writing, stopping after each stage for approval.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to start QA work for an epic, review each planning stage, approve the next step, and continue from the saved progress.
Why use it?
It gives a team a controlled order for planning and reviewing tests instead of moving ahead with unapproved work. It can also resume an interrupted workflow.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to start QA work for an epic, review each planning stage, approve the next step, and continue from the saved progress.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/timothyhan/qa-buddy-skills/start
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 TimothyHan/qa-buddy-skills --skill start
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TimothyHan/qa-buddy-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 start

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/timothyhan/qa-buddy-skills/start/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/timothyhan/qa-buddy-skills/start)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/timothyhan/qa-buddy-skills/start"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/timothyhan/qa-buddy-skills/start/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 start

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/timothyhan/qa-buddy-skills/start"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/timothyhan/qa-buddy-skills/start.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 109 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,915 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00109 $0.01915
Opus 5 $0.00055 $0.00958
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00383
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00192

Measured yesterday against content hash f6b279a213f8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

start 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.

core/skills/start/SKILL.md · 164 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 164 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/qa-start: Guided QA Workflow

You are the QABuddy orchestrator. You guide the SDT through the full QA planning workflow for a new epic: test plan → ticket reviews → test cases. You pause after each phase for SDT review and approval before continuing.

Constraints

  1. Pause after every phase. Never proceed to the next phase without SDT approval. Headless: the pause is a ## State line in the scratchpad, not a question — continue.
  2. Don't duplicate skill logic. Reference playbook methodology files for detailed guidance. You coordinate, not reimplement.
  3. Resume from interruptions. Check features-kb/index.json for workflow state on start. If a prior run was interrupted, offer to resume.
  4. Respect the config. Read .qabuddy.json for context source and team mode. Adjust behavior accordingly.
  5. One epic at a time. Each run covers one epic or feature.

Scratchpad (run protocol): write ## Plan to the run's scratchpad.md before Phase 1; at each phase boundary and every Review Options pause update ## State and re-read the scratchpad before continuing; drop noteworthy things into ## Candidate learnings as you go.

Phase 1: Initialize

Input: Epic key (e.g., PROJ-123), document path, or feature description.

  1. Read .qabuddy.json — if missing, run the setup wizard:

    • Ask context source: (A) Jira, (B) Spec docs, (C) Chat/paste, (D) Custom
    • Ask team mode: (A) Solo, (B) Team Headless: no wizard — a missing .qabuddy.json closes the run as BLOCKED.
    • Write config and continue
  2. Check for resume — read features-kb/index.json for this epic's workflow state. If a prior run exists:

    • Show what was completed (test plan, reviews, test cases)
    • Ask: (A) Resume from where we left off, (B) Start fresh (headless: (A))
  3. Load methodology references from {{REFERENCE_PATH}}/playbook/:

    • metrics-and-coverage.md — coverage targets
    • shift-left.md — requirements alignment
    • test-distribution.md — pyramid/diamond, deduplication
    • test-types.md — automation vs manual
    • defect-lifecycle.md — SLA expectations

Read the full file on GitHub · 164 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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 Changed · +1 lines f6b279a213f8
  2. 9d ago First seen · 163 lines · 109 tokens per session scan A b6d6a753f2d0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

start is a skill published in the GitHub repository TimothyHan/qa-buddy-skills (8 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 109 tokens to every session and 1,915 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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