Agent Skill
Forming An Openrig Mental Model skill
forming-an-openrig-mental-modelmvschwarz/openrigpackages/daemon/assets/plugins/openrig-core/skills/forming-an-openrig-mental-model/SKILL.md
Use when the system around you does not make sense yet: you just booted into a seat and do not know how the pieces fit; someone said rig, pod, seat, fleet, topology, or slice and you are not certain what they mean here; you are unsure what kind of rig you are in or what it is for; you do not know how skills reach you or where context comes from; or you are about to act on a guess about how OpenRig works. Gives the runtime mental model fast, so you stop guessing.
always on
117 tokname + description
once used
3,860 tokSKILL.md body
bundled files
0
repo stars
8.1kGitHub
Install the Forming An Openrig Mental Model skill
Skills CLI (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and others)
npx skills add https://github.com/mvschwarz/openrig --skill forming-an-openrig-mental-model
Claude Code, by hand (all projects)
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mvschwarz/openrig.git /tmp/openrig mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills cp -R /tmp/openrig/packages/daemon/assets/plugins/openrig-core/skills/forming-an-openrig-mental-model ~/.claude/skills/forming-an-openrig-mental-model
For one project only, copy the folder into .claude/skills/ in that project instead. The agent picks it up when a task matches its description.
What it costs your context
Agent Skills load in three steps. Tokens counted with the o200k tokenizer; your model's count will differ a little.
| When | What loads | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Every session | Name and description | 117 tok |
| When the agent uses it | The SKILL.md instructions | 3,860 tok |
| Only if opened | No bundled files | — |
Until it is used, forming-an-openrig-mental-model costs about 12× less than the median MCP server we measured (1,362 tokens on every turn). Installing all 94 skills from mvschwarz/openrig would load 6,757 tokens of descriptions. Skills vs MCP study
Checks
Our checks found nothing to flag: it follows the Agent Skills specification's naming and size guidelines and doesn't pipe downloads into a shell.
Checked 2026-10-22 · method
What's inside
The headings of its SKILL.md. Read the full file on GitHub.
- Forming an OpenRig Mental Model
- The 60-second mental model
- The four-layer model (where you live)
- Three pillars of context
- The core vocabulary (read these terms literally)
- Rig classes (what kind of rig am I in?)
- How skills load (the most important thing to get right)
- The shape
- Progressive disclosure (why skills scale)
- Where skills come from in OpenRig
- Where skills live (sources of truth)
- The product loop (your day-to-day)
- Cultural posture (how to behave)
- What you should do in your first 10 minutes
- Going deeper (canonical references)
- What this skill is NOT for
- Common misorientations to avoid
- Disaster-recovery test for this skill
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