A command-line operations skill for Talos Linux clusters, including cluster lifecycle work, upgrades, reboots, node diagnosis, etcd maintenance, and troubleshooting. Talos Linux is an operating system designed to run Kubernetes clusters.

Managing Talos nodes, inspecting and changing machine configuration, upgrading or rebooting nodes, maintaining etcd, and diagnosing cluster problems.

It adds safety checks to configuration changes, requiring a dry run and review before applying them and distinguishing full replacements from targeted patches.

talosctl — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by Aidas-dev

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.

Any agent

npx skills add Aidas-dev/k8s-agent-skills --skill talosctl

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Aidas-dev/k8s-agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aidas-dev/k8s-agent-skills/talosctl/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aidas-dev/k8s-agent-skills/talosctl)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aidas-dev/k8s-agent-skills/talosctl"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aidas-dev/k8s-agent-skills/talosctl/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aidas-dev/k8s-agent-skills/talosctl"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aidas-dev/k8s-agent-skills/talosctl.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 33 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 8,178 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00033	$0.08178
Opus 5.5	$0.00013	$0.03271
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00007	$0.01636
Haiku 4.5	$0.00003	$0.00818

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 85411bfd9fc7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

talosctl 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 2mo 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.

skills/talosctl/SKILL.md · 552 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 552 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

talosctl — CLI Operations

For machine config YAML (documents, patching) see talosconfig. For Terraform provider see talos-terraform.

⚠️ Configuration Changes Require Dry-Run + Verification

Every apply-config and patch machineconfig MUST be dry-run first, and the user MUST review/approve the output before anything is applied:

# Dry-run first — always
talosctl patch machineconfig --nodes <ip> --patch @patch.yaml --dry-run
talosctl apply-config --nodes <ip> --file config.yaml --dry-run

Only after the user explicitly confirms the dry-run output, run without --dry-run.

⚠️ apply-config Needs the FULL Config File

talosctl apply-config --file <config> replaces the node's entire machine configuration with the contents of <config>. It is NOT a patch tool — providing a partial YAML wipes all unspecified settings.

Full-file changes (install, network rewrite, secrets rotation) → talosctl apply-config --file <full-config.yaml>
Targeted changes (one field) → talosctl patch machineconfig --patch @patch.yaml
Get the current full config first: talosctl get machineconfig v1alpha1 -o yaml

CLI Quick Reference

Cluster Lifecycle

Command	Purpose
`talosctl gen config <name> <endpoint> --with-secrets secrets.yaml`	Generate cluster configs (full config files)
`talosctl gen secrets --output-file secrets.yaml`	Generate secrets bundle
`talosctl apply-config --nodes <ip> --file config.yaml --insecure`	Apply FULL config to new node
`talosctl bootstrap --nodes <ip>`	Bootstrap etcd (once, first CP only)
`talosctl kubeconfig --nodes <ip> --force`	Get admin kubeconfig (overwrite existing)
`talosctl health --nodes <cps> --wait-timeout=10m`	Check cluster health
`talosctl version`	Show client + server versions

Maintenance

Command	Purpose
`talosctl upgrade --image ghcr.io/siderolabs/installer:v1.13.8 --reboot-mode=default`	Upgrade Talos OS (drains node by default)
`talosctl upgrade --no-reboot`	Upgrade, defer reboot (replaces deprecated `--stage`)
`talosctl upgrade --drain=false`	Upgrade without draining (use with care)
`talosctl upgrade-k8s --to v1.36.2 --dry-run`	Upgrade Kubernetes (dry-run first)
`talosctl upgrade-k8s --to v1.36.2`	Upgrade Kubernetes
`talosctl rollback --nodes <ip>`	Rollback Talos to previous install
`talosctl reboot --mode=default`	Reboot node (default/force/powercycle)
`talosctl reset --graceful --reboot`	Reset node (removes from cluster)
`talosctl shutdown`	Shutdown node (cordon/drain first, `--force` to skip)

Read the full file on GitHub · 552 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.

2mo ago First seen · 552 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A 85411bfd9fc7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

talosctl is a skill published in the GitHub repository Aidas-dev/k8s-agent-skills (4 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 33 tokens to every session and 8,178 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.

Debugging DevOps and cloud

talosctl next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
talosctlAidas-dev/k8s-agent-skills	Skill	4	2mo ago	MIT	A	33	Claude Code, Codex
systematic-debuggingopen-metadata/OpenMetadata	Skill	16k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	37	Claude Code
log-error-digestzebbern/claude-code-guide	Skill	4.7k	3d ago	MIT	A	71	Claude Code, Codex
cwv-optimizeradobe/skills	Skill	319	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	112	Claude Code
ci-fixersipyourdrink-ltd/bernstein	Skill	1.2k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	15	Claude Code, Codex
triaging-web-analytics-supportPostHog/posthog	Skill	41k	yesterday	none	A	151	Claude Code, Codex
diagnosing-missing-recordingsPostHog/posthog	Skill	41k	yesterday	none	A	76	Claude Code, Codex