patrol

A command that runs one monitoring cycle for an agent-support role such as witness, deacon, or refinery. It checks messages and cleanup work, then creates or resumes the role's assigned work item.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to run a witness, deacon, or refinery patrol, process pending messages, handle cleanup items, and resume an existing patrol when one is already active.
Why use it?
Background agent work can leave behind unfinished tasks, dirty workspaces, or messages needing attention. A patrol cycle gives the selected role a defined routine for finding and handling them.

Command for Claude Code

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 commands/gastownhall/gastown/patrol
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gastownhall/gastown

Made for: Claude Code.

Per session 19 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,233 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 $0.00019 $0.01233
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00616
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00247
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00123

Measured yesterday against content hash 1f6948be8cdf, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

patrol 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.

.claude/commands/patrol.md · 146 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 146 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Patrol

Run one patrol cycle for the specified role. Patrol is a continuous monitoring loop — each invocation executes one cycle of the patrol formula.

Arguments: $ARGUMENTS If no role specified, detect from current GT_ROLE environment variable.

Role Detection

echo $GT_ROLE

Map to patrol type:

  • */witness → witness patrol (mol-witness-patrol)
  • */deacon or */deacon/* → deacon patrol (mol-deacon-patrol)
  • */refinery → refinery patrol (mol-refinery-patrol)
  • Explicit argument overrides detection

Patrol Entry Point

gt patrol new --role <role>

This creates a hooked wisp with steps from the patrol formula. If a patrol is already running (wisp exists on hook), resume it instead.

Witness Patrol Steps

The witness is the per-rig polecat supervisor. Execute in order:

1. inbox-check

gt mail inbox

Process any pending messages: POLECAT_DONE, MERGED, HELP, escalations. Read each with gt mail read <id> and take appropriate action.

2. process-cleanups

Check for cleanup wisps (dirty state from dead polecats):

bd list --status=open --label=cleanup --json

Process each: verify git state, clean worktrees, close cleanup wisps.

3. check-refinery

gt peek gastown/refinery

Verify refinery is alive and processing the merge queue. If stuck, nudge: gt nudge gastown/refinery "Health check — are you processing?"

4. survey-workers

Check all active polecats in the rig:

gt peek gastown/polecats

For each active polecat:

  • Check if session is alive (has recent activity)
  • Check if work is progressing (commits, bead updates)
  • Detect zombies: session dead but agent_state says working
  • Detect stale spawns: spawning > 10 minutes

Nudge idle polecats:

gt nudge gastown/polecats/<name> "Progress check — what's your status?"

5. check-timer-gates

bd list --label=gate:timer --status=open --json

Evaluate any timer-based gates that may have elapsed.

6. check-swarm

Check for convoy/swarm completion across coordinated work:

bd list --label=convoy --status=open --json

Read the full file on GitHub · 146 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 · 146 lines · 19 tokens per session scan A 1f6948be8cdf

Subscribe to this mod's changes

patrol is a command published in the GitHub repository gastownhall/gastown (17,849 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 19 tokens to every session and 1,233 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.