star-method

A four-step structure for explaining an experience: Situation, Task, Action, and Result.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for job interviews, performance reviews, project retrospectives, and case studies.
Why use it?
It turns vague claims about what you handled into a clear account of the context, your responsibility, your actions, and the outcome.

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/tupe12334/instinct/star-method
Any agent
npx skills add tupe12334/instinct --skill star-method
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tupe12334/instinct

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 23 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,972 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 $0.00023 $0.01972
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.00986
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00394
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00197

Measured yesterday against content hash e0ad1f3c8c71, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

star-method 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.

skills/star-method/SKILL.md · 157 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 157 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

star Method

Overview

star is a four-part narrative structure for communicating past experiences or case studies with precision and impact. Each element builds on the last: context sets the scene, task pins accountability, action shows what you did, result proves it worked.

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  S ──► T ──► A ──► R                                    │
│                                                         │
│  Situation   Task       Action      Result              │
│  (context)  (your      (steps      (measurable         │
│              role)      taken)      outcome)            │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Use star in behavioral interviews, performance reviews, retrospectives, case study presentations, and any situation where "trust me, I handled it" is not enough.

Element Breakdowns

S — Situation

Set the scene with just enough context for the listener to understand what was at stake.

Include:

  • What was happening and why it mattered
  • The scale or scope (team size, revenue at risk, timeline pressure)
  • Any constraints the audience needs to evaluate your response

Keep it to 1–3 sentences. Do not editorialize — state facts.

Bad: "Things were pretty chaotic and nobody knew what to do." Good: "Our production database went down during peak traffic, affecting 40,000 active users and threatening $200K in same-day revenue."

T — Task

State your specific responsibility. This separates what the situation demanded from what you were accountable for.

Include:

  • Your role or title at the time
  • What was explicitly expected of you
  • Any competing priorities or constraints you personally faced

Bad: "I needed to fix things." Good: "As on-call engineer, I was responsible for restoring service within our 30-minute SLA while keeping the support team informed."

A — Action

The most important section. Detail the steps you personally took — not "we did."

Structure:

  1. First action and rationale
  2. Pivots or decisions made under uncertainty
  3. How you handled obstacles or involved others

Read the full file on GitHub · 157 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. yesterday First seen · 157 lines · 23 tokens per session scan A e0ad1f3c8c71

Subscribe to this mod's changes

star-method is a skill published in the GitHub repository tupe12334/instinct (1 stars, last pushed 16d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 23 tokens to every session and 1,972 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.