ast-grep

A skill for ast-grep, a tool that searches and rewrites code based on its structure rather than matching plain text. It works across 25 programming languages.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find code with a particular shape or apply codemods, such as changing logging calls, replacing imports, removing unsafe casts, finding empty error handlers, or detecting missing await expressions.
Why use it?
Text search can match code in the wrong context, while structure-aware matching can target specific functions, calls, classes, imports, or other code patterns. This makes broad, repeatable code changes safer.

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/code-yeongyu/lazycodex/ast-grep
Any agent
npx skills add code-yeongyu/lazycodex --skill ast-grep
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/code-yeongyu/lazycodex

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 110 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,303 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 $0.00110 $0.03303
Opus 5 $0.00055 $0.01651
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00661
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00330

Measured 2d ago against content hash c5512fb49494, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ast-grep 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 5 executable files (install.ps1, install.sh, scripts/ast_grep_helper.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/omo/skills/ast-grep/SKILL.md · 273 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 273 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

ast-grep

sg (also installed as ast-grep) is an AST-aware search and rewrite tool across 25 languages. It treats your pattern as code, parses it the same way it parses your project, and matches structurally. It is the right tool whenever your question depends on code shape rather than text bytes.

This skill ships a Python wrapper at scripts/ast_grep_helper.py and platform install scripts at install.sh (POSIX) and install.ps1 (Windows). The helper adds offline pattern validation, the two-pass write trick, and binary auto-resolution. Use it as your default entry point.


When to use this skill

Use it whenever the user's question is about code structure, not bytes:

  • "Find every function that takes a Request parameter."
  • "Rewrite every console.log(x) to logger.info(x)."
  • "Strip every as any cast."
  • "Replace require(...) with import across the repo."
  • "Find empty catch blocks."
  • "Migrate Optional[X] to X | None."
  • "Apply this codemod across these 200 files."
  • "Run our YAML lint rules and surface violations."

Switch to plain grep / rg when the question is text-shaped (string literal contents, comments, license headers, file names, cross-language regex). When in doubt, ask: "does the answer depend on the language's syntax tree, or just on the file's bytes?" If the former, ast-grep. If the latter, grep.


Three things the agent must internalize

1. ast-grep is NOT regex

The wildcards are $VAR (one AST node) and $$$ (zero or more nodes). Regex syntax fails silently:

You wrote What ast-grep saw What you wanted
foo|bar bitwise-or of foo and bar run two separate searches
.*foo not parseable $$$ foo (if $$$ is a list of nodes) or use rg
\w+ not parseable $VAR to capture any identifier
[a-z] character class, not parseable switch to rg

The full anti-pattern table is in references/pitfalls.md §1. The helper's validate subcommand catches these mechanically — call it before debugging "no matches" by hand.

Read the full file on GitHub · 273 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 · 273 lines · 110 tokens per session scan A c5512fb49494

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ast-grep is a skill published in the GitHub repository code-yeongyu/lazycodex (3,363 stars, last pushed 23d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 110 tokens to every session and 3,303 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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