guard

guard is a skill for Claude Code from garrytan/gstack. It costs 19 tokens per session (999 once invoked), scanned C, original, MIT.

A combined safety mode that warns before destructive commands and restricts file edits to a chosen directory.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you need maximum protection while debugging or making changes in a narrowly defined part of a project.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of deleting data or changing unrelated files during work on production systems or live codebases.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; names the AskUserQuestion tool; built for gstack.

Good fit Use it when you need maximum protection while debugging or making changes in a narrowly defined part of a project.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/garrytan/gstack/guard
About the project

gstack is a set of opinionated tools that gives a coding agent workflows associated with roles such as product leadership, design, engineering management, release management, documentation, and quality assurance. It is for developers who want one coding agent to support more parts of the software delivery process.

garrytan/gstack · 136,569 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 garrytan/gstack --skill guard
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/garrytan/gstack

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 guard

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/garrytan/gstack/guard/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/garrytan/gstack/guard)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/garrytan/gstack/guard"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/garrytan/gstack/guard/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 guard

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/garrytan/gstack/guard"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/garrytan/gstack/guard.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 19 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 999 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan C 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: 1 finding, 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 52
    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 $0.00019 $0.00999
Opus 5.5 $0.00008 $0.00400
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00004 $0.00200
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00100

Measured 7d ago against content hash d9bd6607fb7c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

guard scanned grade C 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 7d 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.

Recursive force deletehighDestructive command

rm -rf with a variable or a broad path is one typo away from removing the wrong tree.

Combines /careful (warns before rm -rf, DROP TABLE, force-push, etc.) with
Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

  • guard — 100% identical, 38 lines differ
guard/SKILL.md · 93 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 93 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

When to invoke this skill

Combines /careful (warns before rm -rf, DROP TABLE, force-push, etc.) with /freeze (blocks edits outside a specified directory). Use for maximum safety when touching prod or debugging live systems. Use when asked to "guard mode", "full safety", "lock it down", or "maximum safety".

/guard — Full Safety Mode

Activates both destructive command warnings and directory-scoped edit restrictions. This is the combination of /careful + /freeze in a single command.

Dependency note: This skill references hook scripts from the sibling /careful and /freeze skill directories. Both must be installed (they are installed together by the gstack setup script).

GSTACK_STATE_ROOT=$(~/.claude/skills/gstack/bin/gstack-paths --get GSTACK_STATE_ROOT); : "${GSTACK_STATE_ROOT:?gstack-paths failed; reinstall with ./setup or /gstack-upgrade}"
mkdir -p "$GSTACK_STATE_ROOT"/analytics
echo '{"skill":"guard","ts":"'$(date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ)'","repo":"'$(basename "$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel 2>/dev/null)" 2>/dev/null || echo "unknown")'"}'  >> "$GSTACK_STATE_ROOT"/analytics/skill-usage.jsonl 2>/dev/null || true

Setup

Ask the user which directory to restrict edits to. Use AskUserQuestion:

  • Question: "Guard mode: which directory should edits be restricted to? Destructive command warnings are always on. Files outside the chosen path will be blocked from editing."
  • Text input (not multiple choice) — the user types a path.

Once the user provides a directory path:

Set the user-selected boundary with the shared writer, which resolves a physical absolute path and serializes replacement with investigation cleanup:

bash "$HOME/.claude/skills/gstack/freeze/bin/freeze-state.sh" set "<user-provided-path>"

On helper failure, do not claim the boundary is active. Preserve the state and report recovery; never bypass the shared writer with a direct write or deletion.

Read the full file on GitHub · 93 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 7d ago Changed · +10 lines d9bd6607fb7c
  2. 11d ago Changed 9e23547784d0
  3. 12d ago Changed 6ee895108f53
  4. 14d ago Changed · +1 lines 810fbbced541
  5. 19d ago Changed · -9 lines 7d110c484b77
  6. 1mo ago First seen · 91 lines · 19 tokens per session scan C ae1ec65c4256

Subscribe to this mod's changes

guard is a skill published in the GitHub repository garrytan/gstack (136,569 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 19 tokens to every session and 999 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it C with 1 finding (recursive force delete). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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