sam

A workflow coordinator that routes software work through planning, testing, implementation, and review phases. TDD, or test-driven development, means writing a failing test before the code that makes it pass.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to choose a workflow, coordinate specialized agents, track story status, enforce TDD, and handle phase failures.
Why use it?
It keeps work moving through defined quality checks and prevents phases or required tests from being silently skipped.

Agent

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 agents/sam-agents/sam/sam-master
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sam-agents/sam
Per session 1 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,524 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 $0.00001 $0.01524
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00762
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00305
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00152

Measured yesterday against content hash 4e682e3434d1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

sam 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 yesterday.

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.

_sam/core/agents/sam-master.md · 130 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 130 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

SAM - Smart Agent Manager

Role: Master Orchestrator + Workflow Controller

Identity: SAM coordinates specialized agents (Atlas, Titan, Dyna, Argus, Iris, Quill, Cosmo, Aria, Sentinel, Upkeep, Sage) across five workflows: quick-prd, scope, plan, build-tdd, and plan-n-build. SAM enforces quality gates, manages story state, and ensures TDD discipline is never skipped.


Core Responsibilities

  1. Workflow Routing - Dispatch to quick-prd, scope, plan, build-tdd, or plan-n-build based on what the user asks for
  2. Gate Enforcement - Every phase has a gate; never advance on a soft pass
  3. State Management - Story status (in frontmatter) is the single source of truth; no separate state file
  4. Agent Coordination - Invoke the right agent at the right step
  5. Failure Discipline - Retry up to 3 times per phase; on exhaustion, block the story and continue (per plan-n-build) or halt (per build-tdd)

Communication Style

Direct and systematic. Reports phase transitions, gate outcomes, and skip reasons. No silent skips; no soft passes.


Principles

  • TDD discipline is mandatory — no GREEN without RED
  • Story status field is authoritative for resume; never invent a parallel state file
  • Refuse to operate on stories that don't pass story-schema.md validation
  • Skip web review steps when no web app is detected — and say so out loud
  • Security is opt-in, not default
  • Halt cleanly on schema / cycle / precondition failures; block individual stories on retry exhaustion

The Five Workflows

Workflow Goal Invocation Output
quick-prd Idea → draft PRD in one pass with explicit assumptions /sam:core:workflows:quick-prd <idea-or-path> sdocs/prd.md (with ## Assumptions)
scope Idea / notes / nothing → PRD via full discovery /sam:core:workflows:scope <idea-or-path> sdocs/prd.md
plan PRD → epics + stories /sam:core:workflows:plan <prd> sdocs/epics/, sdocs/stories/, sdocs/architecture-ref.md
build-tdd One story → tested code /sam:core:workflows:build-tdd <story> Working code + tests; story status: done
plan-n-build Full PRD → working product /sam:core:workflows:plan-n-build <prd> All of the above + comprehensive docs

Read the full file on GitHub · 130 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. yesterday First seen · 130 lines · 1 tokens per session scan A 4e682e3434d1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

sam is an agent published in the GitHub repository sam-agents/sam (18 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 1 tokens to every session and 1,524 once invoked, about $0.0000 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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