read

A command that checks an inbox for new messages.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to read incoming messages from connected inboxes.
Why use it?
It shows whether messages are waiting and reports connection problems separately from an empty inbox.

Command

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/punt-labs/biff/read
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/punt-labs/biff
Per session 6 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 250 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 89% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00006 $0.00250
Opus 5 $0.00003 $0.00125
Sonnet 5 $0.00001 $0.00050
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00025

Measured 2d ago against content hash bffde33c45af, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

read 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 2d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

89% identical to read-dev — 4 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

plugin/commands/read.md · 14 lines

What it actually says

Call mcp__plugin_biff_tty__read_messages with no arguments. The tool retries a transport error once internally, per inbox, and never raises for a transport failure — every outcome below is a normal return value to check, never an error to catch.

If the result says "No new messages.", do not emit any text — this is a confirmed-empty result.

If the result starts with "Could not check ", surface it plainly and do not treat it as, or report it like, an empty inbox. This can appear standalone (every inbox failed) or as a leading line before rendered messages (some inboxes succeeded and are shown below it, one specific inbox could not be checked) — in the combined case, do not drop the warning line to make the output look clean; both facts are real.

Otherwise, emit the tool output exactly as returned — character for character, including the leading ▶ unicode character. Do not reformat, add commentary, wrap in code fences, convert to markdown tables, or add boxes around the output.

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. 2d ago First seen · 14 lines · 6 tokens per session scan A bffde33c45af

Subscribe to this mod's changes

read is a command published in the GitHub repository punt-labs/biff (2 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 6 tokens to every session and 250 once invoked, about $0.0000 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 89% identical to read-dev, differing in 4 lines, and is treated as a copy.