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.
npx agentmods add skills/xbluesky/cortexes/cortex-distillnpx skills add XBlueSky/cortexes --skill cortex-distillgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/XBlueSky/cortexesWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/xbluesky/cortexes/cortex-distill)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/xbluesky/cortexes/cortex-distill"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xbluesky/cortexes/cortex-distill.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00041 | $0.04124 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00020 | $0.02062 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00008 | $0.00825 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00412 |
Grade A, and why
cortex-distill 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 today.
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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 407 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Cortex Distill — Refine Raw Records
Extract valuable knowledge from Raw/ session dumps into Notes/ and Projects/.
Resolve Vault Path
Read ~/.cortex/config.json to get vault_path.
If the file doesn't exist, tell the user to run /cortexes:genesis first.
Step 1: Find Unprocessed Raw Files
List the distill queue:
cortex-vec distill-queue --root <vault_path>/Raw
This is position-anchored: a Raw counts as distilled only if a
<!-- distilled: ... --> marker appears in its header (before the first
### User turn) or as its last non-empty line. Do NOT grep the
marker string — a pipeline meta-session's body quotes it dozens of times
(it printfs markers onto other files), so grep -rL '<!-- distilled:'
silently drops genuine work from the queue. To check one file, use
cortex-vec raw-state <file>.
Show the pending list count and ask to proceed.
Step 1.5: Schedule the Batch (only when queue > 1 file)
Size the queue before opening any Raw:
cortex-vec distill-queue --root <vault_path>/Raw --stat
Partition by RAW size (the raw column) and present the plan for
approval (do not auto-run):
- Normal lane — Raws whose raw size fits well inside one session budget (default 100K chars of raw-derived output). Process a batch this session, strictly one Raw at a time.
- Monster lane — Raws whose complete review clearly exceeds one
session budget. One Raw per dedicated session; expect
BUDGET_EXHAUSTED+distill-plan resume --new-sessioncontinuations.
Carry remaining lanes forward with a cortex-takeoff baton. When a plan
is mid-flight, record its plan_id in the baton — machine state lives in
the plan cache, the baton only points at it.
Step 2: Stage 1 — Has Insight (map-first)
One Raw at a time. NEVER Read the full Raw file; NEVER judge from an L3/L3* projection. All original text arrives through bounded pages.
-
Start (or resume) the plan:
cortex-vec distill-plan start <raw-file>
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.
- today Changed 216e078af7f1
- 4d ago First seen · 407 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A 617df3e7dc8c
cortex-distill is a skill published in the GitHub repository XBlueSky/cortexes (20 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 4,124 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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