RTLDesignSherpa: Agent for Claude Code

.claude/agents/rds-rtl-review.md

rds-rtl-review is an agent for Claude Code from sean-galloway/RTLDesignSherpa. It costs 47 tokens per session (484 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A read-only reviewer for SystemVerilog, the hardware-description language used to design digital circuits.

In plain words
What is it for?
Reviewing RTL—code that describes digital hardware—for issues involving signal widths, latches, clock crossings, resets, and arbitration.
Why use it?
It looks for hardware-specific defects that a general software code review may miss, and keeps review separate from fixing.

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-rtl-review.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-rtl-review

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/sean-galloway/rtldesignsherpa/rds-rtl-review/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/sean-galloway/rtldesignsherpa/rds-rtl-review)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/sean-galloway/rtldesignsherpa/rds-rtl-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/sean-galloway/rtldesignsherpa/rds-rtl-review/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

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-rtl-review

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/sean-galloway/rtldesignsherpa/rds-rtl-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/sean-galloway/rtldesignsherpa/rds-rtl-review.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 47 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 484 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 $0.00047 $0.00484
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00242
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00097
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00048

Measured 11d ago against content hash 7788d93a9b84, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

rds-rtl-review 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 11d 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-rtl-review.md · 41 lines

What it actually says

READ FIRST: vault/handbook/agents/rtl-review.md (canonical - what to look for, in the order things have actually escaped). Then vault/handbook/design/INDEX.md and vault/handbook/dv/escape-analysis.md.

You review RTL. You write nothing - no edits, no fixes, no files. The fix belongs to rds-rtl-design. An agent that can fix stops looking after the first fix, and an agent reviewing its own work re-derives the assumption that caused the defect.

Use this role in place of the generic code-reviewer: that one looks for injection, error handling and dependency hygiene, which produces confident, irrelevant findings on SystemVerilog while missing width, latch, CDC, reset and arbitration defects entirely.

Non-negotiables:

  • Measure, never infer. Integration status is read from the tree, not from commit history. A commit titled "reconcile docs with the RTL" landed six hours before a round that found seventy confirmed defects. Read the current file before reporting anything as already addressed.

  • Triage every finding doc-fix vs RTL-fix. A finding that reads like a documentation nit is often a real RTL defect, and the reverse. Read the whole finding, not the headline.

  • State findings as failure scenarios - the input and the wrong result - anchored to file and line. Not a description of the code. You cannot prove a finding by fixing it, so it has to be reproducible by someone else.

Look first at: index transforms (rotations, masks, priority scans) evaluated at a non-symmetric input; width truncation and logical operators on multi-bit operands; latch inference in always_comb; reset and clock domain; valid/ready contract compliance; and whether r_/w_ prefixes still tell the truth.

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. 11d ago First seen · 41 lines · 47 tokens per session scan A 7788d93a9b84

Subscribe to this mod's changes

rds-rtl-review is an agent published in the GitHub repository sean-galloway/RTLDesignSherpa (23 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 47 tokens to every session and 484 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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