cross-squad

cross-squad is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from github/gh-aw. It costs 41 tokens per session (2,402 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A coordination guide for working with multiple independent Squad installations. It explains how to discover another Squad and distinguish the product term from an ordinary group of agents.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find peer Squads, delegate work across installations, and choose the appropriate communication method.
Why use it?
It prevents requests from being sent to the wrong kind of agent group and provides a basis for cross-repository coordination.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex ✓ vendor

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Needs its repository: it reads a path above its own folder, which exists only inside the repository. The line is # Friend's repo is checked out at ../friend-platform/.

Good fit Use it to find peer Squads, delegate work across installations, and choose…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
About the project

GitHub Agentic Workflows is a GitHub CLI extension that lets developers define AI-assisted repository automation in Markdown and run it through GitHub Actions. It is intended for tasks requiring interpretation or reasoning, such as issue triage, pull-request review, CI investigation, documentation maintenance, and dependency analysis. The catalogue entries provide skills and agents for working with these workflows.

github/gh-aw · 5,108 stars · on GitHub · gh.io

Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/github/gh-aw
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/github/gh-aw/cross-squad

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 cross-squad

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/github/gh-aw/cross-squad.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/github/gh-aw/cross-squad)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/github/gh-aw/cross-squad"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/github/gh-aw/cross-squad.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,402 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 $0.00041 $0.02402
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.01201
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00480
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00240

Measured 3d ago against content hash 8f62616ee398, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cross-squad 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 3d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

2 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

.squad/templates/skills/cross-squad/SKILL.md · 175 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 175 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Context

Read this FIRST any time the user says "squad" as a thing to spawn, delegate to, address, or fan out to — e.g., "spawn two squads of designers and devs", "ask the other squad", "delegate to a squad". In Squad-PRODUCT vocabulary, "squad" is a peer (an independent installation with its own .squad/, team.md, MCP server, and agents) — NOT a generic English synonym for "team" or "group". Do not fan out raw task agents inside your own coordinator context when the user means "another squad". Use the discovery and communication patterns below (and the companion cross-squad-communication skill for the actual protocols).

When an organization runs multiple Squad instances (e.g., platform-squad, frontend-squad, data-squad), those squads need to discover each other, share context, and hand off work across repository boundaries. This skill teaches agents how to coordinate across squads without creating tight coupling.

Companion skill — for protocol details: cross-squad-communication/SKILL.md covers the four communication patterns (synchronous CLI, read-only knowledge query, git-based async, and GitHub-issue-based delegation) once a peer squad is discovered via the registry below. This skill answers "who?" — the companion answers "how?".

Cross-squad orchestration applies when:

  • A task requires capabilities owned by another squad
  • An architectural decision affects multiple squads
  • A feature spans multiple repositories with different squads
  • A squad needs to request infrastructure, tooling, or support from another squad

Disambiguation: "squad" vs ad-hoc agents

When the user uses the word "squad" / "squads" or asks to "spawn a team", the coordinator MUST treat it as a literal reference to a Squad install (a .squad/ directory with its own roster, casting, and coordinator) — NOT as a casual synonym for "a group of sub-agents".

Default behaviour (apply unless explicitly told otherwise)

User says Coordinator does
"spawn two squads of X and Y" / "set up squads for X, Y, Z" Bootstrap N real Squad installs — separate folder + git init + squad init per squad — then use the cross-squad patterns below (.squad/manifest.json, squad registry add, squad delegate) and the protocols in the cross-squad-communication skill
"ask the other squad about X" / "delegate to the data squad" Discover the peer via squad registry list (or by reading a known .squad/manifest.json), then use cross-squad-communication Pattern 0 / 1 / 2 / 3 — never re-implement the protocol with task
"spawn a few agents to do X" / "have some agents review X" / "in parallel, get sub-agents to..." Ad-hoc task fan-out is fine — no .squad/ bootstrap needed. This is the only path where raw task is appropriate when the user mentioned a multi-agent activity

Read the full file on GitHub · 175 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. 3d ago First seen · 175 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A 8f62616ee398

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cross-squad is a skill published in the GitHub repository github/gh-aw (5,108 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 2,402 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 2026-09-03.