catchup

A workflow that updates a local codebase from its main branch and explains recent engineering changes in product language.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to pull recent code, summarize changes, check whether product context is present and current, and report missing or outdated context.
Why use it?
It helps product people stay informed without losing the product notes and context stored alongside the project.

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/vgrss/acumen/catchup
Any agent
npx skills add VGrss/Acumen --skill catchup
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/VGrss/Acumen

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 48 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,448 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 $0.00048 $0.01448
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00724
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00290
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00145

Measured 2d ago against content hash 861736ca65f2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

catchup 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.

.agents/skills/catchup/SKILL.md · 149 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 149 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Purpose

Product people working on top of a codebase need to stay current with what engineers shipped — without risking the product context they've built up. This skill pulls the latest code and translates recent changes into product language.

Step 1: Protect product context

Before touching anything, confirm that product context files are safe:

  1. Check that .acumen.md, .acumen/, and any other product context files exist and are gitignored
  2. If any product context files are tracked by git (not gitignored), stop and warn the user — those files could be overwritten by a pull

List the protected files found and confirm they're safe.

Step 2: Pull latest code

  1. Check for uncommitted changes with git status. If there are local changes to tracked files:
    • Run git stash to save them
    • Note that changes were stashed so you can report this later
  2. Pull from main:
    git pull origin main
    
  3. If there were stashed changes, run git stash pop and report any conflicts.

Step 3: Summarize what changed

Determine the time range:

  • If the user provided a [since] argument (e.g., "last week", "since Monday", "3 days"), use it
  • Otherwise, use the last time the user could have synced — check git reflog show --date=relative for the previous pull, or default to last 7 days

Gather changes

git log --since="<date>" --merges --oneline
git log --since="<date>" --no-merges --oneline

Also check for recently merged PRs if gh is available:

gh pr list --state merged --limit 20 --json number,title,body,mergedAt,author

Write the summary

Organize changes into a product-friendly summary. Do NOT just list commits — translate them:

  • What shipped — new capabilities, visible changes, things users/stakeholders would notice
  • What improved — performance, reliability, UX refinements
  • What was fixed — bugs that were resolved
  • Under the hood — refactors, infra, CI changes (keep brief, 1-2 lines max)

Read the full file on GitHub · 149 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 · 149 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A 861736ca65f2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

catchup is a skill published in the GitHub repository VGrss/Acumen (11 stars, last pushed 26d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 1,448 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-08-30.

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