external-comms

external-comms is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from github/gh-aw. It costs 20 tokens per session (3,023 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A human-reviewed workflow for finding recent unanswered GitHub issues and discussions, drafting replies, and presenting them for approval. It never posts replies by itself.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to scan GitHub issues and discussions, draft possible answers, review them in a table, and keep an audit log of the work.
Why use it?
It removes the need to search community conversations and prepare each response manually while keeping a person in control of publishing.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 · 5,104 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.

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

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 external-comms

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/github/gh-aw/external-comms.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/github/gh-aw/external-comms)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/github/gh-aw/external-comms"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/github/gh-aw/external-comms.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 20 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,023 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 $0.00020 $0.03023
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.01511
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00605
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00302

Measured yesterday against content hash 00e68bc3da9a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

external-comms 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 yesterday.

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

8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

.squad/templates/skills/external-comms/SKILL.md · 330 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 330 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Context

Phase 1 is draft-only mode.

  • PAO scans issues and discussions, drafts responses with the humanizer skill, and presents a review table for human approval.
  • Human review gate is mandatory — PAO never posts autonomously.
  • Every action is logged to .squad/comms/audit/.
  • This workflow is triggered manually only ("PAO, check community") — no automated or Ralph-triggered activation in Phase 1.

Patterns

1. Scan

Find unanswered community items with GitHub MCP tools first, or gh issue list / gh api as fallback for issues and discussions.

  • Include open issues and discussions only.
  • Filter for items with no squad team response.
  • Limit to items created in the last 7 days.
  • Exclude items labeled squad:internal or wontfix.
  • Include discussions and issues in the same sweep.
  • Phase 1 scope is issues and discussions only — do not draft PR replies.

Discussion Handling (Phase 1)

Discussions use the GitHub Discussions API, which differs from issues:

  • Scan: gh api /repos/{owner}/{repo}/discussions --jq '.[] | select(.answer_chosen_at == null)' to find unanswered discussions
  • Categories: Filter by Q&A and General categories only (skip Announcements, Show and Tell)
  • Answers vs comments: In Q&A discussions, PAO drafts an "answer" (not a comment). The human marks it as accepted answer after posting.
  • Phase 1 scope: Issues and Discussions ONLY. No PR comments.

2. Classify

Determine the response type before drafting.

  • Welcome (new contributor)
  • Troubleshooting (bug/help)
  • Feature guidance (feature request/how-to)
  • Redirect (wrong repo/scope)
  • Acknowledgment (confirmed, no fix)
  • Closing (resolved)
  • Technical uncertainty (unknown cause)
  • Empathetic disagreement (pushback on a decision or design)
  • Information request (need more reproduction details or context)

Template Selection Guide

Signal in Issue/Discussion → Response Type Template
New contributor (0 prior issues) Welcome T1
Error message, stack trace, "doesn't work" Troubleshooting T2
"How do I...?", "Can Squad...?", "Is there a way to...?" Feature Guidance T3
Wrong repo, out of scope for Squad Redirect T4
Confirmed bug, no fix available yet Acknowledgment T5
Fix shipped, PR merged that resolves issue Closing T6
Unclear cause, needs investigation Technical Uncertainty T7
Author disagrees with a decision or design Empathetic Disagreement T8
Need more reproduction info or context Information Request T9

Read the full file on GitHub · 330 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. yesterday First seen · 330 lines · 20 tokens per session scan A 00e68bc3da9a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

external-comms is a skill published in the GitHub repository github/gh-aw (5,104 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 20 tokens to every session and 3,023 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 2026-09-03.

Related

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