berd-help

A guide for using and troubleshooting Berd, a desktop app for working with agents, skills, automations, projects, sessions, providers, and connections.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps explain how to operate Berd, diagnose problems, configure its features, use agents and skills, manage automations, and work with berdctl.
Why use it?
It prevents guesses about app behavior, settings, menus, and command-line options by requiring instructions to be checked against the available app evidence.

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/block/berd/berd-help
Any agent
npx skills add block/berd --skill berd-help
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/block/berd

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 49 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,251 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 $0.00049 $0.01251
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00626
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00250
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00125

Measured 2d ago against content hash fa419b0a14a4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

berd-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 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.

distro/skills/berd-help/SKILL.md · 115 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 115 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Berd help

Use this skill to help users operate, troubleshoot, and script Berd — the desktop app — from a normal chat. Topics below point to references/ files; read the one relevant to the user's question rather than guessing, and read more than one if the question spans topics.

First Principles

  • Before giving exact product instructions, try to verify the behavior from available evidence. If source code is available, inspect it first. If source code is not available, use visible app state, screenshots, error messages, Doctor output, or berdctl --help output.
  • Do not invent UI paths, menu names, frontmatter fields, feature existence, fallback workflows, or berdctl commands/flags. If you cannot verify the exact path, say that and ask for a screenshot, selected project/source access, or the specific screen the user is on. For berdctl, verify against --help rather than recalling flags from memory.
  • Treat the current app behavior as the source of truth. Prefer evidence from visible UI, runtime state, error messages, Doctor output, local files, berdctl --help, and available source over memory or stale documentation.
  • Give practical steps the user can try now. Keep the answer short unless the problem needs a deeper diagnosis.
  • Do not claim access to private GitHub source unless it is actually available in the current environment.
  • Berd changes fast. Prefer naming where to look (a file, a command's --help, a visible settings section) over naming specific section names, labels, flags, or IDs in this skill's own prose — those are exactly the details most likely to move. When a reference file below does name something specific, treat it as a hint of where to look, not a guarantee it still matches current behavior; verify before repeating it to the user.

Scope

This skill is about Berd the app — not about any one harness running inside a session (goose, claude-acp, codex-acp, copilot-acp, amp-acp, cursor-agent). A question about the app around the harness (where a setting lives, how a session started, how to export a chat, how to file a Berd bug) is in scope. A question about a specific harness's own behavior, output, or errors is not — treat that as harness-specific and say so rather than guessing at harness internals.

Read the full file on GitHub · 115 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 · 115 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A fa419b0a14a4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

berd-help is a skill published in the GitHub repository block/berd (828 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 1,251 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.

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