review-before-follow

review-before-follow is a skill for Claude Code from tomthebearded/guide-forge. It costs 92 tokens per session (385 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A review step that checks an old guide or one of its instructions against the current codebase, tools, and APIs before execution.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before following a previously written technical guide, to inspect real files, update the guide when needed, and issue a go or no-go decision.
Why use it?
Guides can become outdated when files, commands, APIs, or interfaces change; this catches those differences before they cause errors.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: argument-hint in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions Claude Code.

Part of the guide-forge plugin — 14 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it before following a previously written technical guide, to inspect real files, update the guide when needed, and issue a go or no-go decision.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tomthebearded/guide-forge/review-before-follow
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 tomthebearded/guide-forge --skill review-before-follow
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tomthebearded/guide-forge

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install guide-forge, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 14 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 review-before-follow

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tomthebearded/guide-forge/review-before-follow/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tomthebearded/guide-forge/review-before-follow)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tomthebearded/guide-forge/review-before-follow"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tomthebearded/guide-forge/review-before-follow/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 review-before-follow

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tomthebearded/guide-forge/review-before-follow"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tomthebearded/guide-forge/review-before-follow.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 92 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 385 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 $0.00092 $0.00385
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.00192
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00077
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00038

Measured 9d ago against content hash 2a4356237e0c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

review-before-follow 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/review-before-follow/SKILL.md · 35 lines

What it actually says

Skill: review-before-follow

The complete, canonical contract for this skill is the paste-prompt it wraps, inlined here — follow it in full:

!cat "${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/prompt.md"

(If the block above came back empty or errored, read prompt.md in this skill folder — it sits beside this SKILL.md — and follow that.)

As you follow it, adapt for the fact that you're a Claude Code skill, not a pasted prompt:

  • You're already invoked — skip its "How to use / paste this" preamble. The step or guide to review is $ARGUMENTS below (plus any attached real project/tool files to reconcile against).
  • You have file tools here — when reality requires a patch, edit the step on disk and append the drift line to status.md, rather than only printing them. Read the real files yourself where you can.
  • Where the prompt hands off to another prompt by filename, use the sibling skill of the same name.

Step / guide to review:

$ARGUMENTS

Gate: end with a clear go / no-go before anything executes — when the guide and reality disagree, reality wins.

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. 9d ago First seen · 35 lines · 92 tokens per session scan A 2a4356237e0c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

review-before-follow is a skill published in the GitHub repository tomthebearded/guide-forge (3 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 92 tokens to every session and 385 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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