developer

A set of core coding rules for gh-aw changes, including project organization, validation, formatting, testing, and naming conventions. gh-aw refers to the project these rules are written for.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when developing, reviewing, or validating changes in a gh-aw codebase.
Why use it?
It provides a repeatable way to make and check changes, catching basic build and formatting problems early and running broader checks before the final handoff.

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/github/gh-aw/developer
Any agent
npx skills add github/gh-aw --skill developer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/github/gh-aw

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 13 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 973 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 $0.00013 $0.00973
Opus 5 $0.00006 $0.00487
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00195
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00097

Measured 2d ago against content hash bdd69682f02a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

developer 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.

.github/skills/developer/SKILL.md · 103 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 103 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Developer Instructions

Use this reference for gh-aw technical specs and development guidelines across code organization, validation, security, and implementation patterns.

Table of Contents

Operational Command Playbook

Use this section for the detailed day-to-day command flow that was intentionally removed from AGENTS.md to keep first-run ambient context small.

Validation checkpoints

Run validation in tiers — catch compile errors early, defer slow tests to the final pass only.

  1. After each significant code edit (fast, <5s — catch compile errors immediately)
    make build && make fmt
    
  2. Before every intermediate report_progress call (fast, <30s — no tests)
    make agent-report-progress-no-test
    
  3. Before the FINAL report_progress call (change-scoped, includes impacted Go tests)
    make agent-report-progress
    
  4. Before final handoff when time allows
    make agent-finish
    

Key rule: Run test-unit only before the final report_progress call, not before intermediate saves. The pre-PR targets scope formatting, linting, tests, and workflow drift checks to the branch changes.

Timeout budget: make agent-report-progress should normally finish in under 30 seconds. Workflow source or compiler changes additionally run the full workflow drift check. Set TEST_UNIT_RUN_FULL=1 only when the full Go suite is required.

Change-type command matrix

  • Go file changes: make fmt
  • Workflow markdown changes: make recompile
  • JavaScript (*.cjs) changes: make fmt-cjs && make lint-cjs

Common focused checks from recent repository work

  • pkg/workflow/ edits: run go test ./pkg/workflow -count=1 during iteration; narrow with -run when only one workflow behavior is under active change.
  • actions/setup/js/ edits: after make fmt-cjs && make lint-cjs, run the targeted actions/setup/js/*.test.cjs suites for the files you touched. Gateway changes commonly validate with npx vitest run actions/setup/js/start_mcp_gateway.test.cjs.
  • Workflow source changes that also touch compiler or runtime code: run make recompile, then rerun the affected focused Go or JavaScript checks before the final make agent-report-progress.

Read the full file on GitHub · 103 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. 2d ago First seen · 103 lines · 13 tokens per session scan A bdd69682f02a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

developer is a skill published in the GitHub repository github/gh-aw (5,050 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 13 tokens to every session and 973 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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