swarm

A way to send a task to several parallel workers and combine their results into one report. Workers can investigate separate parts or independently attempt the same task.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for parallel research, alternative solutions, coverage checks, competitive attempts, and combined reports.
Why use it?
It increases coverage for exploration, comparisons, races, and other tasks where multiple independent attempts are useful.

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/backnotprop/pstack/swarm
Any agent
npx skills add backnotprop/pstack --skill swarm
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/backnotprop/pstack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 547 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 $0.00041 $0.00547
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00273
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00109
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00055

Measured 2d ago against content hash 8e6494e296af, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

swarm 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

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

  • swarm — 86% identical, 6 lines differ
skills/swarm/SKILL.md · 47 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 47 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Swarm

Fan out N parallel cloud workers. They may cover separate slices, race the same brief, or mix both. The parent waits, aggregates, and returns one report.

Start

Open a todolist with one entry per phase before launching anything.

  1. Frame
  2. Fan out
  3. Aggregate
  4. Report

Phase A: Frame

  1. State the done predicate and the artifact or report the swarm must return.
  2. Choose the shape. Partition into slices, race N workers on identical briefs, or mix both. For a race or mixed shape, declare first pass, rank all, or best-of before spawning.
  3. Set N from the user or derive it from the shape. N is total workers, not the cloud concurrency limit.
  4. Pick the worker model from swarm workers in ~/.cursor/rules/pstack-models.mdc when present. Otherwise use grok-4.6-fast-xhigh. For a model race, name each arm's model up front.
  5. Give each worker its own writable output when it writes. Use a worktree, branch, or /tmp/swarm-<slug>/worker-<n>/.

Phase B: Fan out

Spawn all N workers in one message with subagent_type: generalPurpose, environment: "cloud", run_in_background: true, and the configured model. Use environment: "local" only when the worker needs access to something on the user's computer.

When a worker must start from a non-default pushed branch, pass cloud_base_branch.

Every brief stands alone. Include the goal, scope, exact slice or race arm, how to verify, and what to report. Reports use PASS, ISSUES, or BLOCKED with evidence.

If a worker drops out, proceed with N-1 and note it.

Phase C: Aggregate

Read the terminal results. For coverage, every required slice needs a result. For a race, apply the selection rule declared up front. Use first pass, rank all, or best-of. Do not paste raw worker dumps.

Keep a compact result table, one-line evidenced issues, and explicit gaps or dropouts.

Phase D: Report

Return one consolidated in-chat report with the table, issue one-liners, gaps or dropouts, and the race rule when used.

Read the full file on GitHub · 47 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 · 47 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A 8e6494e296af

Subscribe to this mod's changes

swarm is a skill published in the GitHub repository backnotprop/pstack (165 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 547 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.

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