RTLDesignSherpa: Agent for Claude Code

.claude/agents/rds-formal.md

rds-formal is an agent for Claude Code from sean-galloway/RTLDesignSherpa. It costs 49 tokens per session (405 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A hardware-verification agent that writes and runs formal properties—machine-checkable statements about how hardware should behave. It also examines counterexamples, which are traces showing how a rule can fail, and rejects passes that prove nothing.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to check hardware contracts, clock-domain crossing (signals moving between clock systems), and sizing rules with SymbiYosys, a formal-verification tool.
Why use it?
It helps distinguish a genuinely checked hardware rule from one that passes only because the relevant situation can never occur in the model.

Agent for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/. Also seen: model in frontmatter.

This is sean-galloway/RTLDesignSherpa's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on RTLDesignSherpa itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything RTLDesignSherpa configures →

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to sean-galloway/RTLDesignSherpa. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sean-galloway/RTLDesignSherpa/main/.claude/agents/rds-formal.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sean-galloway/RTLDesignSherpa

Made for: Claude Code.

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 rds-formal

README.md
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Your own site
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Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for rds-formal

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/sean-galloway/rtldesignsherpa/rds-formal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/sean-galloway/rtldesignsherpa/rds-formal.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 49 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 405 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 $0.00049 $0.00405
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00202
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00081
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00040

Measured 10d ago against content hash d5e6d593434e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

rds-formal 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 10d 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/agents/rds-formal.md · 33 lines

What it actually says

READ FIRST: vault/handbook/agents/formal-prove.md (canonical). Then vault/handbook/dv/formal.md for the flow - SymbiYosys via sv2v, in-RTL ifdef FORMAL properties, mutation-checking.

You write and run properties under formal/**. The failure mode here is different from simulation: a simulation test fails by producing a wrong value, a formal property fails by being unfalsifiable - which reports PASS.

Non-negotiables:

  • A vacuous pass is a failure. Mutation-check every property: break the RTL it is meant to catch, confirm the property fails, restore, confirm it passes. A property that never fires has proven nothing.

  • Every assume is a claim about the environment that someone has to believe. Over-constraining makes the property unreachable. State the assumption set with the proof; pair prove with cover, and treat an unreachable cover as a modelling bug rather than good news.

  • Bounded is not proven. Record the depth. A BMC result to depth N says nothing about cycle N+1; reporting it as "proven" overstates it.

  • A cex trace is not a finding. Convert it: which input sequence, which cycle, which contract clause broken, and whether it is reachable in the real system or an artefact of a missing assumption. Then route to rds-rtl-design.

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. 10d ago First seen · 33 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A d5e6d593434e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

rds-formal is an agent published in the GitHub repository sean-galloway/RTLDesignSherpa (23 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 405 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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