github-scan

A command-line tool and operating guide for monitoring GitHub notifications, such as mentions and review requests, and routing them to coding agents. A daemon is a background program that keeps running and checks for new work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to run or inspect the GitHub notification daemon, view its local inbox and activity feed, trigger polls, manage the service, or connect its status to Claude Code.
Why use it?
It removes the need to watch GitHub manually or manage notification handling by hand. It also provides commands for checking status, polling, troubleshooting, and controlling the background service.

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/first-tree-ai/first-tree-legacy/github-scan
Any agent
npx skills add first-tree-ai/first-tree-legacy --skill github-scan
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/first-tree-ai/first-tree-legacy

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 68 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,660 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 $0.00068 $0.01660
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00830
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00332
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00166

Measured 2d ago against content hash 4263bd986d04, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

github-scan 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.

packages/github-scan/skills/github-scan/SKILL.md · 149 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 149 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

GitHub Scan — Operational Skill

This skill is the operational handbook for the github-scan product. If you have not yet loaded the first-tree entry-point skill, load that first — it explains the toolkit layout and the current canonical First Tree skill set. This skill covers how to drive the first-tree github scan CLI.

When To Use This Skill

Load this skill when the task involves any of:

  • Running or inspecting the github-scan daemon
  • Viewing the GitHub notification inbox or the live activity feed
  • Triggering a one-off notification poll
  • Configuring, starting, or stopping the background daemon (launchd on macOS)
  • Installing the github-scan statusline hook into Claude Code
  • Diagnosing a broken github-scan install or a stuck claim

GitHub Scan is designed for agents, not humans — most commands are idempotent and safe to re-run.

Core Concepts

  • Inbox — the local store of explicit GitHub mentions and review requests, under ~/.first-tree/github-scan/.
  • Daemon — a long-running broker process that polls GitHub, keeps the inbox fresh, dispatches work to per-task agent runners, and serves a local HTTP/SSE endpoint on 127.0.0.1:7879 for the dashboard.
  • Runner — a per-task worker spawned by the daemon for a single claim.
  • Claim — exclusive lease on a notification so only one runner acts on it.
  • Statusline — a sub-30 ms Claude Code statusline hook that prints a one-line summary of the inbox state.

CLI Commands

Primary (start here)

Command Purpose
first-tree github scan install --allow-repo owner/repo First-run setup — checks gh/jq/gh auth, creates ~/.first-tree/github-scan/config.yaml with defaults, and starts the daemon. The repo scope is required so github-scan never falls back to scanning the whole account. (Wiring the Claude Code statusline is a separate manual step — see the Statusline section.)
first-tree github scan start --allow-repo owner/repo Launch the daemon in the background (launchd on macOS, detached spawn elsewhere)
first-tree github scan stop Stop the daemon and remove its lock
first-tree github scan status Print the daemon lock + runtime/status.env
first-tree github scan doctor One-screen diagnostic of the local install
first-tree github scan watch Live TUI: status board + activity feed
first-tree github scan poll Poll explicit GitHub mentions and review requests once (no daemon required)

Read the full file on GitHub · 149 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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.

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 · 149 lines · 68 tokens per session scan A 4263bd986d04

Subscribe to this mod's changes

github-scan is a skill published in the GitHub repository first-tree-ai/first-tree-legacy (47 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 1,660 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.