help

help is a command for coding agents from punt-labs/z-spec. It costs 10 tokens per session (1,750 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An interactive tutorial for creating your first Z specification, a formal description of a system's data, states, and rules. It guides you from choosing a system to checking and testing the result.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to model systems such as job queues, login sessions, lending records, inventory, or workflows, then produce a checked specification.
Why use it?
It gives beginners a practical path through formal specification instead of requiring them to learn every command first.

Command

Part of the z-spec-dev plugin — 42 commands, 1 hook shipped together

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/z-spec/help
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/punt-labs/z-spec

Or install z-spec-dev, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 42 commands, 1 hook.

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 help

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/punt-labs/z-spec/help.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/commands/punt-labs/z-spec/help)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/punt-labs/z-spec/help"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/punt-labs/z-spec/help.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 10 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,750 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 $0.00010 $0.01750
Opus 5 $0.00005 $0.00875
Sonnet 5 $0.00002 $0.00350
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00175

Measured 4d ago against content hash e7216f01ec55, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

help 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 4d 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.

plugin/commands/help.md · 149 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 149 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Z Specification Plugin Help

Run this as an interactive getting-started flow. Do not display the material below as a static document — the goal is for the user to leave this conversation holding a fuzz-clean, model-checked Z specification of a problem they actually have, not a page they scrolled past.

Getting Started: Model Your Own Problem

Walk the user through these steps in order. Do not skip ahead to the command table below until this path is complete or the user asks for it directly.

If /z-spec:check or /z-spec:test refuses because z-spec isn't enabled in this repository, run /z-spec:enable first, then resume the step that was refused.

1. Find the stateful system

If the user's request already names a system to model, use it. Otherwise ask: "What's a stateful system you'd like to model? Something with data that changes over time and rules about what states are valid — a job queue, a login session, a library's lending records, an inventory, a workflow with stages." One or two sentences from the user is enough to start; /z-spec:code2model will ask follow-up questions if the description is ambiguous.

2. Draft the specification

Run /z-spec:code2model <their description>. This writes a first .tex spec to docs/ with given sets, a state schema, an Init schema, and a few operations — the raw material, not a finished spec.

3. Type-check it

Run /z-spec:check <the file>. fuzz will very likely report errors on a first draft — that is normal, not a failure. Fix each one and re-run until /z-spec:check reports OK. This loop, not the first draft, is where the spec actually gets built.

4. Model-check it

Run /z-spec:test <the file>. probcli animates the spec and explores its reachable states. If it reports a counter-example, that is the model telling you something true about the specification as written — walk the user through what the counter-example means and fix the spec (an invariant, a precondition, a bound) rather than the report.

Read the full file on GitHub · 149 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. 4d ago First seen · 149 lines · 10 tokens per session scan A e7216f01ec55

Subscribe to this mod's changes

help is a command published in the GitHub repository punt-labs/z-spec (5 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 10 tokens to every session and 1,750 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 2026-08-31.