investigation-timeline-builder

investigation-timeline-builder is a skill for Claude Code from ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills. It costs 38 tokens per session (2,650 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A chronological record of an investigation built from notes, documents, or interview summaries, with sources and uncertain details attached to each event.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to reconstruct incidents, organize investigative reporting, and prepare a timeline for publication.
Why use it?
It turns information collected in different formats and orders into a timeline. It also makes missing, disputed, or unverified dates easier to spot.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the autopunk-media-skills plugin — 187 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to reconstruct incidents, organize investigative reporting, and prepare a timeline for publication.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/investigation-timeline-builder
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 ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills --skill investigation-timeline-builder
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install autopunk-media-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 187 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 investigation-timeline-builder

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/investigation-timeline-builder/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/investigation-timeline-builder)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/investigation-timeline-builder"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/investigation-timeline-builder/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 investigation-timeline-builder

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/investigation-timeline-builder"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/investigation-timeline-builder.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 38 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,650 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 warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Excessive Agency · line 92
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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 $0.00038 $0.02650
Opus 5.5 $0.00015 $0.01060
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00008 $0.00530
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00265

Measured 1mo ago against content hash a0a4fa9dcfb2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

investigation-timeline-builder 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 1mo 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/magazine-journalism/investigation/investigation-timeline-builder/SKILL.md · 148 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 148 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Investigation Timeline Builder

What This Skill Does

Builds a structured, annotated chronological timeline from raw notes, documents, or source interview summaries, formatted for both internal reporting use and potential publication as a graphic.

When To Use This Skill

  • You have accumulated research from multiple sources and need to impose chronological order on a complex sequence of events
  • You are preparing a narrative investigation and need to see the full arc of events before structuring the story
  • You want a timeline that flags gaps, contested dates, and unverified entries so editors can see what still needs reporting
  • You are planning a published timeline graphic and need a draft with source attributions for each entry

What You Need To Provide

Required: Raw notes, document excerpts, or bullet-point summaries of events in any order; the investigation's subject (person, institution, or incident) Optional: Known key dates you want anchored; the intended output use (internal working document vs. publishable graphic); any disputed or uncertain dates you want flagged; sources for specific events (document names, interviewee names)

How the Assistant Approaches This

  1. Extracts all dateable events from the raw input and sorts them chronologically, noting where only approximate dates are available
  2. For each entry, records the event, the source or document it comes from, and a verification status (confirmed, single-source, or unverified)
  3. Identifies structural gaps in the timeline — periods of unexplained silence, missing transitions between events, or logical breaks that suggest something happened but is not yet documented
  4. Produces two versions if requested: a detailed internal version with source notes and verification flags, and a clean publishable version suitable for graphic design handoff
  5. After the timeline, provides a "Next Step" note: identifying the highest-priority reporting gap to close first, whether to run foia-request-writer to obtain official records for an unverified entry, and what is needed before the publishable version can be released

Read the full file on GitHub · 148 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. 1mo ago First seen · 148 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A a0a4fa9dcfb2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

investigation-timeline-builder is a skill published in the GitHub repository ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills (38 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 2,650 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-09-04.

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