lathe: Skill for Claude Code

.claude/skills/lathe-work/SKILL.md

lathe-work is a skill for Claude Code from devenjarvis/lathe. It costs 68 tokens per session (1,633 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A background worker that lets the Lathe web interface send Ask, Verify, and Add-a-part jobs directly to the coding-agent session.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it while `lathe serve` is running to pick up queued work, perform the requested model tasks, and report the results repeatedly until stopped.
Why use it?
It removes the need to copy commands from the browser into the agent whenever the interface creates a job.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/. Also seen: mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code.

This is devenjarvis/lathe's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on lathe itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything lathe configures →

About the project

Lathe is a tool that uses language models to create hands-on, multi-part technical tutorials and lets people study them in a local interface. It is intended for learners who want to follow tutorials themselves, while coding agents can generate, verify, extend, and manage those tutorials through its skills and command-line tool.

devenjarvis/lathe · 1,662 stars · on GitHub

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to devenjarvis/lathe. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/devenjarvis/lathe/main/.claude/skills/lathe-work/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/devenjarvis/lathe

Made for: Claude Code.

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 lathe-work

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/devenjarvis/lathe/lathe-work/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/devenjarvis/lathe/lathe-work)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/devenjarvis/lathe/lathe-work"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/devenjarvis/lathe/lathe-work/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for lathe-work

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/devenjarvis/lathe/lathe-work"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/devenjarvis/lathe/lathe-work.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 68 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,633 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
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 $0.00068 $0.01633
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00816
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00327
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00163

Measured 10d ago against content hash dfba3de95857, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

lathe-work 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 10d 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.

.claude/skills/lathe-work/SKILL.md · 71 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 71 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Lathe — Worker Loop

Start a long-running loop that lets the lathe serve web UI drive Ask, Verify, and Add-a-part directly in this session. With this loop running, the browser buttons enqueue a job and you pick it up here — no copy-paste of a /lathe-* command. Triggered by /lathe-work.

This is just long-poll → do the model work → report → repeat, so it works in any supported coding agent. The strict boundary still holds: the binary never drives a model. All model work runs here, in your normal interactive session — never via -p / headless. Verify runs the tutorial's code under exactly the same trust model as /lathe-verify does today (a fresh mktemp -d, your normal permissions).

When this loop is not running, the buttons fall back to today's copy-paste handoff — so starting it is purely additive.

Prerequisite

lathe serve must be running (the loop talks to it via ~/.lathe/serve.json). If lathe work next reports "no lathe server is running", tell the user to start lathe serve in another terminal, then start the loop.

The loop

Repeat until the user stops you (Ctrl-C, "stop the worker", or closing the session):

  1. Claim the next job:

    lathe work next
    

    This long-polls (~50s) and prints either no task or a single JSON object like:

    {"id":"7","type":"verify","slug":"digital-synth-zig","part":"part-02.md","question":"…","guidance":"…","state":"claimed"}
    
    • If it prints no task, loop back to step 1 immediately — that's just an idle long-poll, not an error.
    • Otherwise parse the JSON and note id, type, slug, and (depending on type) part/question/guidance.
  2. Dispatch on type, applying the existing protocol as the source of truth — don't duplicate or paraphrase it, apply it:

    • verify → apply the /lathe-verify protocol against slug exactly as written (it marks the tutorial verifying, follows it in a fresh scratch dir, and records the outcome via lathe verify-result). When it finishes, close the job:
      lathe work done <id>
      

Read the full file on GitHub · 71 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. 10d ago First seen · 71 lines · 68 tokens per session scan A dfba3de95857

Subscribe to this mod's changes

lathe-work is a skill published in the GitHub repository devenjarvis/lathe (1,662 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 1,633 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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