session-start

A session-start context loader for a personal work system. It checks files containing current priorities, state, warnings, daily notes, and unfinished sessions, then presents a compact dashboard.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps start or resume work sessions, review current focus and active work, check known failure patterns, and find session checkpoints.
Why use it?
It helps restore relevant context at the beginning of a coding session instead of relying on memory or manually searching through notes.

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/xcota/pos/session-start
Any agent
npx skills add xcota/pos --skill session-start
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/xcota/pos

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 17 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 446 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 $0.00017 $0.00446
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.00223
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00089
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00045

Measured 3d ago against content hash ad5a70534029, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

session-start 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.

.claude/skills/session-start/SKILL.md · 41 lines

What it actually says

/session-start — Boot Personal OS Context

Boot context for a new working session. Progressive loading: minimal at start, expand by task.

Steps

  1. If state/current.md exists, read it — what's happening across all contexts right now. If it's absent (or context/identity.md still has {{ }} placeholders), the vault isn't set up yet — don't fabricate state. Warmly tell the user, in one line: "This vault isn't set up yet — just say start and I'll do it with you (no commands, no steps)." Then stop and let them.
  2. Read context/priorities.md — current focus and active work
  3. Read context/anti-patterns-index.md → load the LIVE watch-list (active failure modes). Full context/anti-patterns.md is reference — pull by AP-ID when a task touches that domain.
  4. Check if daily/{today's date}.md exists — read last 20 lines for today's events
  5. Scan state/sessions/ — any active checkpoints to continue?
  6. If the task is system architecture, agent runtime, or sync — read context/agent-runtime.md

Output

Display a compact dashboard:

=== Personal OS ===
Focus: {top priorities from priorities.md}
State: {active contexts from current.md}
Watch: {top 3 anti-patterns to remember}
Today: {key events if daily note exists}
Checkpoint: {available session to continue, if any}
===

Rules

  • Total context after boot should be 15-25K tokens, not more
  • Do NOT load all of knowledge/ — only load specific files when the task demands it
  • Do NOT load project context unless working on that project
  • If user wants to continue a session: read the checkpoint, load its context
  • After displaying dashboard, ask "What are we working on?" if not obvious
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 · 41 lines · 17 tokens per session scan A ad5a70534029

Subscribe to this mod's changes

session-start is a skill published in the GitHub repository xcota/pos (43 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 17 tokens to every session and 446 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 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

ori-memory

Persistent agent memory with learning retrieval. Knowledge graph on markdown files — capture insights, decisions, research, and learnings during work, then retrieve them weeks or months later. Use when knowledge is too valuable to lose but too much to inject into every prompt.

aayoawoyemi/Ori-Mnemos · 54 tokens

rtg-knowledge-graph-mcp

Operate the Vellis RTG Knowledge Graph MCP server for agent-driven graph work. Use when an agent has RTG MCP tools such as rtgvalidategraph, rtgapplylivegraphchanges, rtgstageknowledgechanges, rtgapplymigrationcutover, rtgexecutequery, snapshots, or ledger replay, especially for schema evolution, validation recovery…

volantlabs/vellis · 87 tokens

documentation-sync

Keep human documentation synchronized with canonical SysML v2 models, generated component and application views, implementation realizations, repository tooling, skills, and workflow rules. Use after model, code, generated-view, README, AGENTS, skill, command, or public behavior changes.

volantlabs/vellis · 57 tokens

python-component-implementation

Implement, review, or revise Python realizations of components from accepted textual SysML v2 contracts and generated views. Use when creating or aligning Python protocols, component classes, reference implementations, implementation bindings, or black-box contract tests.

volantlabs/vellis · 51 tokens

sysml-reference

Ground textual SysML v2 and KerML authoring, review, language-semantics decisions, construct selection, and official-validator diagnosis in the repository's checksum-pinned specification corpus. Use for questions or changes involving parts, references, features, actions, bindings, successions, flows, ports…

volantlabs/vellis · 92 tokens

model-hygiene-review

Audit accepted SysML v2 component or application models against implementations, protocols, consumers, tests, generated evidence, predecessor contracts, and git history before proposing remediation. Use for periodic model hygiene, suspected model/implementation drift, migration-loss reviews, verification-closure…

volantlabs/vellis · 72 tokens