validate-pipeline

A read-only linter for pipeline.yaml files, which define automated pipeline stages and their relationships. A DAG is a dependency graph with no cycles.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after editing a pipeline or before deployment to check its schema, dependency graph, referenced skills, and precondition types without changing files.
Why use it?
It catches malformed structure, circular stage dependencies, missing skills, and unregistered preconditions before a pipeline runs.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/abilityai/abilities/validate-pipeline
Any agent
npx skills add Abilityai/abilities --skill validate-pipeline
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Abilityai/abilities

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,179 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 $0.00055 $0.02179
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.01090
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00436
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00218

Measured 2d ago against content hash 6850a8633b3a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

validate-pipeline 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.

plugins/agent-dev/skills/validate-pipeline/SKILL.md · 190 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 190 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Validate Pipeline

ℹ️ First, set expectations: before anything else, print one short line with this skill's version and its most recent change — the top entry of metadata.changelog above — e.g. validate-pipeline vX.Y — recent: <summary>. Then proceed.

Read-only linter. Verify a pipeline.yaml is structurally sound. Surfaces errors and warnings; writes no files.

Run this:

  • After any manual edit to pipeline.yaml
  • Automatically at the end of /add-pipeline and /add-pipeline-stage
  • Before deploying the agent to a new environment

The heartbeat (pipeline-tick) reads pipeline.yaml directly each tick. It does not require this skill to have run. If you ship a broken pipeline.yaml, the heartbeat will fail loudly on the next tick — running the linter just gets you that feedback sooner.

Process

Step 1: Resolve target

Expect <pipeline-slug> as the single positional argument. If missing, list pipelines and prompt.

Validate projects/<slug>/pipeline.yaml exists.

Step 2: Schema check

Required top-level keys: schema_version, pipeline_id, name, stages, heartbeat.

PIPELINE_FILE="projects/$SLUG/pipeline.yaml"

SCHEMA=$(yq '.schema_version // 0' "$PIPELINE_FILE")
[ "$SCHEMA" = "1" ] || error "schema_version must be 1 (got: $SCHEMA)"

ID=$(yq '.pipeline_id // ""' "$PIPELINE_FILE")
[ "$ID" = "$SLUG" ] || error "pipeline_id ($ID) doesn't match directory slug ($SLUG)"

STAGE_COUNT=$(yq '.stages | length' "$PIPELINE_FILE")
[ "$STAGE_COUNT" -gt 0 ] || error "No stages defined"

yq '.heartbeat.cron' "$PIPELINE_FILE" >/dev/null || error "heartbeat.cron is required"
yq '.heartbeat.message' "$PIPELINE_FILE" >/dev/null || error "heartbeat.message is required"
yq '.heartbeat.name' "$PIPELINE_FILE" >/dev/null || error "heartbeat.name is required"

Collect all errors and report at the end — don't stop on the first one.

Step 3: Stage-level checks

For each stage in .stages[]:

yq '.stages[] | [.id, .skill, .timeout_seconds, (.retry.max_attempts // 1), (.on_failure // "escalate")] | @tsv' "$PIPELINE_FILE"

Read the full file on GitHub · 190 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. 2d ago First seen · 190 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A 6850a8633b3a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

validate-pipeline is a skill published in the GitHub repository Abilityai/abilities (11 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 2,179 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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