macos-watchdog

macos-watchdog is a skill for Claude Code from daymade/claude-code-skills. It costs 230 tokens per session (2,210 once invoked), scanned B, original, MIT.

Guidance for building macOS launchd watchdogs: persistent background jobs that detect recurring problems and fix them automatically. It covers LaunchAgents, LaunchDaemons, scheduling files, logging, stopping, and safe self-remediation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when creating, editing, deploying, diagnosing, stopping, or restarting a macOS watchdog or other launchd-based background monitor.
Why use it?
It helps prevent a monitoring job from creating new problems such as notification floods, repeated app launches, resource-heavy loops, or false reports.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the daymade-macos plugin — 4 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when creating, editing, deploying, diagnosing, stopping, or restarting a macOS watchdog or other launchd-based background monitor.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/daymade/claude-code-skills/macos-watchdog
About the project

Claude Code Skills Marketplace is a collection and marketplace of skills, plugins, agents, and instructions that extend Claude Code with specialized development workflows. It is for developers who want to install existing workflows or create, validate, and package their own Claude Code skills.

daymade/claude-code-skills · 1,381 stars · on GitHub

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.

Any agent
npx skills add daymade/claude-code-skills --skill macos-watchdog
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/daymade/claude-code-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install daymade-macos, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for macos-watchdog

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/daymade/claude-code-skills/macos-watchdog.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/daymade/claude-code-skills/macos-watchdog)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/daymade/claude-code-skills/macos-watchdog"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/daymade/claude-code-skills/macos-watchdog.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 230 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,210 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 12 findings, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Rogue Agent · line 4
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 9
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 20
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 63
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 64
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 66
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 76
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 78
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 87
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 9
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
  • medium Privilege Escalation · line 74
    Commands invoke sudo or root privileges. Verify this elevated access is necessary and justified.
    Fix: Avoid sudo/root unless strictly required. Prefer least-privilege patterns. If elevation is needed, document the justification and scope.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 75
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
How audits are shown
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 5.1 $0.00230 $0.02210
Opus 5 $0.00115 $0.01105
Sonnet 5 $0.00046 $0.00442
Haiku 4.5 $0.00023 $0.00221

Measured 8d ago against content hash a10fab9a5a5e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

macos-watchdog scanned grade B with 1 finding 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 8d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 3 executable files (evals/iteration-1/eval-2-audit/fixture/broken-heal.sh, scripts/new-launchagent.sh, scripts/watchdog-cooldown.sh), 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.

Asks for rootmediumPrivilege escalation

A mod that escalates privileges can change anything on the machine, not only the project.

| Stop now, allow re-bootstrap later | `launchctl bootout gui/$(id -u)/<label>` (daemon: `sudo launchctl bootout system/<label>`) |
daymade-macos/macos-watchdog/SKILL.md · 92 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 92 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

macOS Watchdog

A watchdog is a launchd job that periodically detects a recurring problem and remediates it without a human. The craft is not "how to install a plist" — it is how to keep the watchdog from becoming a new disturbance: every watchdog on this machine was born from an incident, and the recurring failure mode afterward is the watchdog itself (false "all good" reports, notification floods, re-launching apps the user quit, fork-bomb replays).

The governing principle, learned the expensive way: a watchdog's lifecycle is bound to its premise state. When the condition it exists to fix cannot be fixed by it (broken WiFi, user quit the target app, prerequisite state gone), the watchdog must stand down by itself — not wait for a human to disable it.

Entry decision tree

The situation is… Go to
Installing a NEW watchdog from scratch § Deploy, then § The quiet-watchdog contract
An existing watchdog misbehaves (spam, re-launches apps, hammers) § The quiet-watchdog contract, diagnose which clause it violates
Stopping / disabling / restarting a job § Stop semantics
plist key details (KeepAlive forms, domains, logging, resource limits) references/launchd-plist-reference.md
Cooldown/backoff/notification-throttle patterns + sanitized war stories references/quiet-watchdog-patterns.md
SRE alert layering (page vs ticket, fatigue numbers) references/alert-discipline.md

The quiet-watchdog contract (the four clauses)

Before shipping or blessing any watchdog, all four must hold. Each clause exists because a real watchdog violated it.

1. Premise-state self-check — it knows when it has no job

The script's first act on every run: verify the state that justifies its existence still holds. If not, exit silently — no remediation, no notification, no side effects.

  • A proxy-repair watchdog checks the proxy app is running first; user quit it → skip the cycle.
  • A "did the config switch back" watcher checks the config state it watches; already switched → self-stop, not another round of misleading notifications. (Real case: a recovery watcher kept firing for 2h after its premise resolved, sending 3 spurious notices, because nothing told it to stop.)

Read the full file on GitHub · 92 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. 8d ago First seen · 92 lines · 230 tokens per session scan B a10fab9a5a5e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

macos-watchdog is a skill published in the GitHub repository daymade/claude-code-skills (1,381 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 230 tokens to every session and 2,210 once invoked, about $0.0011 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (asks for root). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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