cold-start

cold-start is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from timurgaleev/memex. It costs 97 tokens per session (4,440 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A setup workflow for filling a new personal knowledge base with useful data on its first day. It can guide imports from Gmail, calendars, contacts, and X/Twitter using managed connectors or offline exports.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to seed a new knowledge base with email history, calendar data, contacts, and social-media information. Each import phase can be completed independently.
Why use it?
An empty knowledge base has little context to use. This workflow organizes the initial imports, asks for consent before each phase, and records progress so setup can be paused and resumed.

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/timurgaleev/memex/cold-start
Any agent
npx skills add timurgaleev/memex --skill cold-start
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/timurgaleev/memex

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 cold-start

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/timurgaleev/memex/cold-start.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/timurgaleev/memex/cold-start)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/timurgaleev/memex/cold-start"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/timurgaleev/memex/cold-start.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 97 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,440 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 $0.04440
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.02220
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00888
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00444

Measured 4d ago against content hash c4775d340880, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cold-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 4d 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.

deploy/skills/cold-start/SKILL.md · 482 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 482 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cold Start — Day-One Brain Bootstrapping

You have a working brain. Search works. Now what?

An empty brain is a static database. A brain with your email history, calendar, contacts, conversations, and social media is a live context membrane that makes every future interaction smarter. This skill sequences the highest-leverage data sources to get you from zero to useful in one session.

Contract

  • Every import phase is gated on user consent (ask-user pattern) before proceeding.
  • Google/social API access goes through the agent host's managed connectors. The agent never holds raw OAuth tokens or API keys. This is a safety requirement, not a preference. Host-managed connectors (e.g. the agent harness's Gmail / Calendar / Contacts MCP integrations) keep credentials in the harness, scope what each tool can do, and put destructive operations behind explicit approval. If no managed connector is available, the only safe alternative is offline file exports (Google Takeout, Twitter archive download).
  • Each phase is independently valuable — the user can stop after any phase and still have a useful brain.
  • Progress is tracked in a brain page at tasks/cold-start-state so interrupted sessions can resume.
  • Entity detection and cross-linking run on every import, not as a separate pass.

Prerequisites

  • memex installed and reachable (memex doctor all green, or run_doctor over MCP)
  • Agent has MCP access to the brain, and shell access for memex CLI commands

The Priority Stack

Data sources ranked by information density × ease of import:

Priority Source Why Time Pages Created
1 Existing markdown/notes vault Highest density — it's already structured 5 min 100s-1000s
2 Google Contacts Seeds the people/ directory — names, emails, companies 10 min 50-500
3 Google Calendar (90 days) Meeting history with attendee context 15 min 30-90
4 Gmail (recent threads) Relationship context, active threads, org chart signals 20 min 50-200
5 Conversations (AI chat exports) Your thinking, questions, mental models 15 min 10-100
6 X/Twitter archive Your public positions, takes, engagement patterns 20 min 30-365
7 File archives (Dropbox/Drive/local) Historical documents, old writing, photos 30+ min varies
8 Meeting transcripts (recorder exports) Deep relationship context from recorded calls 20 min 10-50

Read the full file on GitHub · 482 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. 4d ago First seen · 482 lines · 97 tokens per session scan A c4775d340880

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cold-start is a skill published in the GitHub repository timurgaleev/memex (8 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 97 tokens to every session and 4,440 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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