vara-skills-upgrade

vara-skills-upgrade is a skill for Claude Code from gear-foundation/vara-skills. It costs 38 tokens per session (1,209 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A skill for updating the vara-skills package and checking which version is installed. It is for the skills package itself, not for developing Vara applications.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you need to check the installed vara-skills version or upgrade the package to its latest version, either manually or when an upgrade is detected.
Why use it?
It provides a defined update check and upgrade path, including handling an available upgrade and locating the installed package.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; names the AskUserQuestion tool; positional $N argument.

Part of the vara-skills plugin — 26 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when you need to check the installed vara-skills version or upgrade the package to its latest version, either manually or when an upgrade is detected.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/gear-foundation/vara-skills/vara-skills-upgrade
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 gear-foundation/vara-skills --skill vara-skills-upgrade
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gear-foundation/vara-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install vara-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 26 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 vara-skills-upgrade

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gear-foundation/vara-skills/vara-skills-upgrade/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/gear-foundation/vara-skills/vara-skills-upgrade)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/gear-foundation/vara-skills/vara-skills-upgrade"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gear-foundation/vara-skills/vara-skills-upgrade/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 vara-skills-upgrade

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/gear-foundation/vara-skills/vara-skills-upgrade"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gear-foundation/vara-skills/vara-skills-upgrade.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 38 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,209 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.
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 $0.00038 $0.01209
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.00605
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00242
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00121

Measured 13d ago against content hash 6eaf405b5d3d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vara-skills-upgrade 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 13d 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.

skills/vara-skills-upgrade/SKILL.md · 134 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 134 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Vara Skills Upgrade

Role

Upgrade the vara-skills pack to the latest version. Invoked automatically by the preamble when UPGRADE_AVAILABLE is detected, or manually via /vara-skills-upgrade.

Standalone Usage

Run the update check with force (busts cache and snooze):

_VS_DIR=""
for _d in \
  "${VARA_SKILLS_DIR:-}" \
  "$HOME/.claude/skills/vara-skills" \
  ".claude/skills/vara-skills" \
  "$HOME"/.claude/plugins/cache/vara-skills/vara-skills/*; do
  if [ -n "$_d" ] && [ -f "$_d/bin/vara-skills-update-check" ]; then
    _VS_DIR="$_d"; break
  fi
done
VARA_SKILLS_DIR="${_VS_DIR:-${VARA_SKILLS_DIR:-}}"
export VARA_SKILLS_DIR
_UPD=$("$VARA_SKILLS_DIR/bin/vara-skills-update-check" --force 2>/dev/null || true)
[ -n "$_UPD" ] && echo "$_UPD" || echo "vara-skills is up to date ($(cat "$VARA_SKILLS_DIR/VERSION" 2>/dev/null || echo unknown))"

Then follow the routing below based on output.

Inline Upgrade Flow

This section is called by the preamble when the update check outputs UPGRADE_AVAILABLE <old> <new>.

Step 1: Check auto-upgrade

_AUTO="${VARA_SKILLS_AUTO_UPGRADE:-}"

If _AUTO is true or 1, skip to Step 3 (upgrade silently).

Step 2: Ask the user

Use AskUserQuestion:

vara-skills v{new} is available (you have v{old}).

A) Upgrade now B) Not now (snooze) C) Never ask again

If A (Upgrade now): proceed to Step 3.

If B (Not now): Write snooze state and continue with the original skill.

# Read current snooze level (default to 0 if no file)
_SNOOZE_LEVEL=0
_SNOOZE_FILE="${VARA_SKILLS_STATE_DIR:-$HOME/.vara-skills}/update-snoozed"
if [ -f "$_SNOOZE_FILE" ]; then
  _SNOOZE_LEVEL=$(awk '{print $2}' "$_SNOOZE_FILE" 2>/dev/null || echo 0)
fi
_SNOOZE_LEVEL=$(( _SNOOZE_LEVEL + 1 ))
mkdir -p "${VARA_SKILLS_STATE_DIR:-$HOME/.vara-skills}"
echo "{new} $_SNOOZE_LEVEL $(date +%s)" > "$_SNOOZE_FILE"

Tell the user the snooze duration (level 1: 24h, level 2: 48h, level 3+: 7 days) and continue.

Read the full file on GitHub · 134 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 13d ago First seen · 134 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A 6eaf405b5d3d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vara-skills-upgrade is a skill published in the GitHub repository gear-foundation/vara-skills (17 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 1,209 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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