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.
npx agentmods add skills/davisjam/model-based-agentic-software-engineering/self-operationsnpx skills add davisjam/model-based-agentic-software-engineering --skill self-operationsgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/davisjam/model-based-agentic-software-engineeringWhat 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 | $0.00196 | $0.04083 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00098 | $0.02041 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00039 | $0.00817 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00020 | $0.00408 |
Grade A, and why
self-operations 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 239 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
self-operations — run the repo like a DevOps engineer
You are operating the way the work is done in this repository — the agent fleet and the substrate that
produces it. Your job is a DevOps engineer's: keep it running, know how it works, improve it when you
touch it. This is the operate half of the pair; self-governance is the
harden half. Operate routes a break to its fix; when a failure recurs, hand it to self-governance.
The two are two lenses on one substrate, not competitors: self-governance is the design-time census of
controls (what exists, what's missing, how to mint one); this skill is their run-time operation. A
mechanism lives in that census and is run here — the same thing seen design-time vs run-time.
Read principles.md — the portable operating mindset (positive-first, route-to-class,
observability-first RCA, typed runbooks, semantic-gap placement, freedom-to-improve). The rest of this
skill is the map you operate against and the bootstrap that fits it to this repo.
How to use this skill
- Orient positive first. Read the lifecycle map below — know the healthy baseline before you hunt a break. Most sessions are steady-state operation.
- When something breaks, find the symptom's class in your Part B catalog (match the class, not the example that seeded the row), follow its resolving doc, and run the matching runbook's typed steps.
- If the cause is unknown, RCA observability-first (
principles.mdA.3) — an observability gap is itself the first finding. - After resolving, if this failure has happened more than once, run the partner
self-governanceskill (interpret-failure mode) to classify the class and design the control — a registered, designed control, never an inline hack. Governance is design.
The core lifecycles (the map — know normal before you hunt a break)
Every agent-fleet repo manages the same five core lifecycles (plus cron/scheduling and the operator's own hooks where present). The structure is shared; only the bindings differ (your Part B).
What ships with it
39 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
- examples/lifecycle-L1-manage-agents.md 2.6 KB
- examples/lifecycle-L2-manage-context.md 3.2 KB
- examples/lifecycle-L3-manage-git-repo.md 2.4 KB
- examples/lifecycle-L4-manage-deploy.md 1.9 KB
- examples/lifecycle-L5-manage-dev-env.md 1.8 KB
- examples/lifecycle-L6-govern-your-own-loop.md 4.7 KB
- examples/runbook-audit-model-code-drift.md 7.0 KB
- examples/runbook-convert-recurring-failure-to-control.md 4.0 KB
- examples/runbook-drain-unreleasable-mainline.md 2.0 KB
- examples/runbook-get-a-red-deploy-green.md 2.9 KB
- examples/runbook-keep-the-tree-clean.md 2.9 KB
- examples/runbook-query-the-caused-by-mix.md 2.6 KB
- examples/runbook-rca-an-ambiguous-signal.md 3.1 KB
- examples/runbook-reclaim-a-full-disk.md 1.9 KB
- examples/runbook-recover-a-broken-scheduler.md 3.4 KB
- examples/runbook-recover-the-fleet.md 2.3 KB
- hooks/_claude_hook_output_schema.py 10 KB runs code
- hooks/_hook_harness.py 5.6 KB runs code
- hooks/_hook_registry.py 12 KB runs code
- hooks/bank_status.py 14 KB runs code
- hooks/hook_reflection_turn_end.py 14 KB runs code
- hooks/hook_skill_usage_telemetry.py 8.4 KB runs code
- hooks/meta-hook.svg 7.4 KB
- hooks/README.md 19 KB
- hooks/reflection_facet_bank_consistency.py 14 KB runs code
- hooks/reflection_facet_memory_routing.py 12 KB runs code
- hooks/reflection_facet_recurrence.py 5.7 KB runs code
- hooks/reflection_facet.py 14 KB runs code
- hooks/reflection_turn_end_query.py 6.8 KB runs code
- hooks/settings.snippet.json 1.9 KB
- hooks/skill_usage_query.py 7.6 KB runs code
- hooks/test_hook_output_schema_conformance.py 8.5 KB runs code
- principles.md 6.3 KB
- templates/design-doc-template-starter.md 11 KB
- templates/emit-handoff-starter.py 9.3 KB runs code
- templates/EPIC-TEMPLATE-starter.md 13 KB
- templates/gen-and-lint-partb-starter.py 11 KB runs code
- templates/pointers-starter.yaml 4.6 KB
- templates/runbooks-starter.yaml 4.1 KB
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.
- 2d ago First seen · 239 lines · 196 tokens per session scan A 14a77aa61e74
self-operations is a skill published in the GitHub repository davisjam/model-based-agentic-software-engineering (18 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 196 tokens to every session and 4,083 once invoked, about $0.0010 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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