brief

brief is a skill for Claude Code from tony/skills. It costs 35 tokens per session (925 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of situate-brief, MIT.

A short-explanation guide for moments when someone is confused or has lost track of a discussion.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps an agent explain an unfamiliar idea, answer a simple point of confusion, and offer a small number of next options.
Why use it?
It turns a vague request for help into a brief explanation without adding unnecessary detail.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the situate plugin — 4 skills shipped together

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/tony/skills/brief
Any agent
npx skills add tony/skills --skill brief
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tony/skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install situate, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 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 brief

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tony/skills/brief.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tony/skills/brief)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tony/skills/brief"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tony/skills/brief.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 35 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 925 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 91% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00035 $0.00925
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00463
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00185
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00093

Measured 2d ago against content hash 7aba0fbea37a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

brief 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 2d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

91% identical to situate-brief — 19 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

plugins/situate/skills/brief/SKILL.md · 99 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 99 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Brief

Someone just said "huh". Give them five lines and get out of the way.

Read ../../references/brief.md before answering — it carries the five-line budget, the ranking that decides what earns a line, the option-line format, and the evidence tiers. /situate:what is the explicit entry point to this same contract.

Recognizing the trigger

The signal is a question with no subject. "What does the parser do" names what it wants and is an ordinary question. "What" on its own names nothing, because the user cannot yet articulate what they are missing — that inability is the thing to fix.

Treat these as the same ask: a bare interrogative, a request to back up, or an admission of being lost. Treat anything with a stated object as a normal question and answer it normally.

When genuinely unsure, answer briefly rather than asking which they meant. A five-line answer to the wrong reading costs less than a clarifying round-trip, and it usually reveals the right reading.

A request to be caught up is not this skill, even though it overlaps. "Bring me up to speed on this branch", "what is this pull request waiting on", "where did this work leave off" all name what they want and want it in full — that is situational-awareness, and /situate is its explicit form. This skill is for the moment before someone can phrase that request.

The description above deliberately carries none of that vocabulary — no branch, pull request, ticket, or catching up. Routing scores terms, so naming those here to disclaim them makes this skill match the prompts it is disclaiming, and it takes them from the sweep that should own them. The boundary belongs in this body, which is read only after the skill is already chosen.

What "huh" is usually about

Rank by how recently the confusion could have started.

Most often it is the last thing that happened in the session — a command that ran, a decision taken, a direction changed without being announced. That answer is already in context and needs no tools.

Read the full file on GitHub · 99 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. 2d ago First seen · 99 lines · 35 tokens per session scan A 7aba0fbea37a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brief is a skill published in the GitHub repository tony/skills (2 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 35 tokens to every session and 925 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 91% identical to situate-brief, differing in 19 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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