external-comms

A review-first workflow for finding unanswered GitHub issues and discussions and drafting replies. GitHub issues track work or questions, while discussions are longer community conversations.

In plain words
What is it for?
It scans eligible issues and discussions, prepares draft replies, shows them for review, and records the actions taken.
Why use it?
It helps a team find recent unanswered community messages while ensuring a person approves every response before it is posted.

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/alonf/mcppythondemo/external-comms
Any agent
npx skills add alonf/MCPPythonDemo --skill external-comms
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alonf/MCPPythonDemo

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 20 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,023 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 100% 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 $0.00020 $0.03023
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.01511
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00605
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00302

Measured yesterday against content hash 00e68bc3da9a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

external-comms 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.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to external-comms — 0 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.

.squad/templates/skills/external-comms/SKILL.md · 330 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 330 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Context

Phase 1 is draft-only mode.

  • PAO scans issues and discussions, drafts responses with the humanizer skill, and presents a review table for human approval.
  • Human review gate is mandatory — PAO never posts autonomously.
  • Every action is logged to .squad/comms/audit/.
  • This workflow is triggered manually only ("PAO, check community") — no automated or Ralph-triggered activation in Phase 1.

Patterns

1. Scan

Find unanswered community items with GitHub MCP tools first, or gh issue list / gh api as fallback for issues and discussions.

  • Include open issues and discussions only.
  • Filter for items with no squad team response.
  • Limit to items created in the last 7 days.
  • Exclude items labeled squad:internal or wontfix.
  • Include discussions and issues in the same sweep.
  • Phase 1 scope is issues and discussions only — do not draft PR replies.

Discussion Handling (Phase 1)

Discussions use the GitHub Discussions API, which differs from issues:

  • Scan: gh api /repos/{owner}/{repo}/discussions --jq '.[] | select(.answer_chosen_at == null)' to find unanswered discussions
  • Categories: Filter by Q&A and General categories only (skip Announcements, Show and Tell)
  • Answers vs comments: In Q&A discussions, PAO drafts an "answer" (not a comment). The human marks it as accepted answer after posting.
  • Phase 1 scope: Issues and Discussions ONLY. No PR comments.

2. Classify

Determine the response type before drafting.

  • Welcome (new contributor)
  • Troubleshooting (bug/help)
  • Feature guidance (feature request/how-to)
  • Redirect (wrong repo/scope)
  • Acknowledgment (confirmed, no fix)
  • Closing (resolved)
  • Technical uncertainty (unknown cause)
  • Empathetic disagreement (pushback on a decision or design)
  • Information request (need more reproduction details or context)

Template Selection Guide

Signal in Issue/Discussion → Response Type Template
New contributor (0 prior issues) Welcome T1
Error message, stack trace, "doesn't work" Troubleshooting T2
"How do I...?", "Can Squad...?", "Is there a way to...?" Feature Guidance T3
Wrong repo, out of scope for Squad Redirect T4
Confirmed bug, no fix available yet Acknowledgment T5
Fix shipped, PR merged that resolves issue Closing T6
Unclear cause, needs investigation Technical Uncertainty T7
Author disagrees with a decision or design Empathetic Disagreement T8
Need more reproduction info or context Information Request T9

Read the full file on GitHub · 330 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 · 330 lines · 20 tokens per session scan A 00e68bc3da9a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

external-comms is a skill published in the GitHub repository alonf/MCPPythonDemo (0 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 20 tokens to every session and 3,023 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to external-comms, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

next-cache-components-adoption

Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…

vercel/next.js · 95 tokens

babysit-pr

Babysit a GitHub pull request after creation by continuously polling review comments, CI checks/workflow runs, and mergeability state until the PR is merged/closed or user help is required. Diagnose failures, retry likely flaky failures up to 3 times, auto-fix/push branch-related issues when appropriate, and keep…

openai/codex · 114 tokens

imagegen

Generate or edit raster images when the task benefits from AI-created bitmap visuals such as photos, illustrations, textures, sprites, mockups, or transparent-background cutouts. Use when Codex should create a brand-new image, transform an existing image, or derive visual variants from references, and the output…

openai/codex · 113 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens

next-cache-components-optimizer

Drive a Next.js route to instant navigation by setting up an agentic loop, under Cache Components / PPR, on initial load (hard navigation) and client-side navigation (soft navigation). Encode the goal as a failing @next/playwright instant() e2e and work it to green, one verified route at a time; the shipped test then…

vercel/next.js · 170 tokens