cortex-takeoff

cortex-takeoff is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from XBlueSky/cortexes. It costs 130 tokens per session (1,881 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A session hand-off tool that creates a short continuation note for a specific task in a repository. The note is temporary, ignored by Git, and read by a later coding session.

In plain words
What is it for?
Creating, listing, resuming, and clearing hand-off notes for separate work lines in a repository.
Why use it?
It lets another session continue long-running work without relying on the full previous conversation.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the cortex plugin — 6 skills, 5 commands, 2 hooks 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/xbluesky/cortexes/cortex-takeoff
Any agent
npx skills add XBlueSky/cortexes --skill cortex-takeoff
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/XBlueSky/cortexes

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install cortex, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills, 5 commands, 2 hooks.

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 cortex-takeoff

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xbluesky/cortexes/cortex-takeoff.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/xbluesky/cortexes/cortex-takeoff)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/xbluesky/cortexes/cortex-takeoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xbluesky/cortexes/cortex-takeoff.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 130 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,881 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 $0.00130 $0.01881
Opus 5 $0.00065 $0.00941
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00376
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00188

Measured 3d ago against content hash 82958310bab9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cortex-takeoff 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 3d 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/cortex-takeoff/SKILL.md · 172 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 172 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cortex Takeoff — Session Hand-off Baton

A baton is a curated continuation note for ONE work line (topic) in ONE repo. It lives at <vault>/.takeoff/<repo-slug>/<topic>.md, is git-ignored, and is consumed by a later session. A repo may hold several batons at once — one per work line. Batons are independent of the Raw session dump (which SessionEnd writes automatically). Do NOT commit them, distill them, broadcast them, index them with cortex-vec, or log them to log.md.

Legacy layout: <vault>/.takeoff/<repo-slug>.md (single-baton era, no topic key). Legacy batons still list, resume, and clear (via --legacy), and are retired to the new layout on their next hand-off. Never create new ones.

Locating takeoff.sh

The repo slug and git-safety are handled by takeoff.sh, bundled in this plugin at hooks/scripts/takeoff.sh. In every mode below, FIRST set TK to that helper, resolved relative to THIS skill's base directory. The skill-load message announces the base directory as <...>/cortex/<version>/skills/cortex-takeoff; takeoff.sh sits two levels up. Substitute the actual announced base-dir path:

TK="<skill-base-dir>/../../hooks/scripts/takeoff.sh"
test -f "$TK" || { echo "cortex: takeoff.sh not found at $TK" >&2; exit 1; }

Do NOT use claude plugin root (no such subcommand) or $CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT (unset for skill-run bash).

Resolving the repo root

Every bash "$TK" … call takes an EXPLICIT cwd argument — there is no $PWD fallback (a drifted shell cwd once deleted the wrong repo's baton). Resolve the repo root ONCE per mode and reuse it verbatim in every call:

cwd="$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)"

If your shell may have cd'ed to another repo earlier in the session, resolve from a path you KNOW belongs to this repo (e.g. a file you have been editing) instead of trusting the shell's current directory.

Mode

Determined by the command argument:

Argument Mode
(none) or <topic> create — write/overwrite one work line's baton
resume [topic] resume — load a baton (do not delete)
done [topic] done — clear a baton (soft-delete to trash)

Read the full file on GitHub · 172 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. 3d ago First seen · 172 lines · 130 tokens per session scan A 82958310bab9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cortex-takeoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository XBlueSky/cortexes (20 stars, last pushed 28d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 130 tokens to every session and 1,881 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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