cold-start

cold-start is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from yogsoth-ai/north-star-crystallization. It costs 54 tokens per session (541 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A step-by-step research-planning guide for someone who has no clear research topic. It helps explore a field, narrow possible directions, understand obstacles, break goals into parts, and define a central research aim.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan research from the beginning, including identifying the people involved, surveying a field, comparing topics, analyzing barriers, and forming a research brief.
Why use it?
It provides structure when a person wants to do research but does not yet know what to investigate or how to choose a direction.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to plan research from the beginning, including identifying the people involved, surveying a field, comparing topics, analyzing barriers, and forming a research brief.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/yogsoth-ai/north-star-crystallization/cold-start
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 yogsoth-ai/north-star-crystallization --skill cold-start
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/yogsoth-ai/north-star-crystallization

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 cold-start

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yogsoth-ai/north-star-crystallization/cold-start.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/yogsoth-ai/north-star-crystallization/cold-start)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/yogsoth-ai/north-star-crystallization/cold-start"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yogsoth-ai/north-star-crystallization/cold-start.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 54 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 541 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.
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 $0.00054 $0.00541
Opus 5 $0.00027 $0.00270
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00108
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00054

Measured 7d ago against content hash d452fede47b3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cold-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 7d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

skills/cold-start/SKILL.md · 62 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 62 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cold Start Strategy

The user knows nothing — they want to publish at a top venue but have no idea what to research.

Questioning Protocol

All SOPs in this strategy follow these rules:

  • One question at a time — never overwhelm with multiple questions
  • Prefer multiple choice when possible — easier to answer
  • Always allow "unsure" / "TBD" as legitimate answers
  • Always ask WHY — not just "what do you want" but "why do you want it"
  • After user answers: confirm understanding before continuing
  • If user's answer reveals new information: immediately follow up
  • If user declines to answer (privacy): accept, note that downstream work becomes broader/more iterative

Available Tactics

Tactic Purpose
actor-profiling Understand who the user is
landscape-reconnaissance Broad, shallow field exploration
direction-narrowing Focus within chosen field(s)
obstacle-analysis Identify and mitigate barriers
goal-decomposition KAOS-style AND/OR goal structuring
north-star-synthesis Converge into North Star + ResearchBrief

Default Flow (reference only)

actor-profiling → landscape-reconnaissance → direction-narrowing
→ obstacle-analysis → goal-decomposition → north-star-synthesis

This is a reference, not a mandate. You decide the actual execution path.

Iteration Points

  • From obstacle-analysis: may return to landscape-reconnaissance, direction-narrowing, or obstacle-analysis itself
  • From goal-decomposition: may return to landscape-reconnaissance, direction-narrowing, obstacle-analysis, or goal-decomposition itself

How to Use This Strategy

You are the general. This strategy gives you:

  1. A default flow as starting reference
  2. Available tactics with their purposes
  3. Iteration points where backtracking makes sense

What you decide:

  • Whether to execute a tactic fully or partially
  • Whether to skip a tactic entirely
  • Whether to invoke individual SOPs directly (bypassing tactic framing)
  • When to iterate and where to return to
  • When enough information exists to move forward

Read the full file on GitHub · 62 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. 7d ago First seen · 62 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A d452fede47b3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cold-start is a skill published in the GitHub repository yogsoth-ai/north-star-crystallization (2 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 541 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-31.

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