job-babysitter

job-babysitter is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from glebis/claude-skills. It costs 147 tokens per session (1,358 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A watcher for long-running background jobs such as media encoding, data processing, agent pipelines, or browser services.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to monitor a background command and receive a result indicating whether it is done, needs attention, or is blocked.
Why use it?
It removes the need to repeatedly check whether a slow job has finished, stalled, or needs attention.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it to monitor a background command and receive a result indicating whether it is done, needs attention, or is blocked.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/glebis/claude-skills/job-babysitter
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 glebis/claude-skills --skill job-babysitter
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/glebis/claude-skills

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 job-babysitter

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/glebis/claude-skills/job-babysitter/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/glebis/claude-skills/job-babysitter)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/glebis/claude-skills/job-babysitter"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/glebis/claude-skills/job-babysitter/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 job-babysitter

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/glebis/claude-skills/job-babysitter"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/glebis/claude-skills/job-babysitter.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 147 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,358 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. 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 Excessive Agency · line 80
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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 $0.00147 $0.01358
Opus 5 $0.00073 $0.00679
Sonnet 5 $0.00029 $0.00272
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00136

Measured 8d ago against content hash be45a1ed8c1c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

job-babysitter 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 8d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/watch_job.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/job-babysitter/SKILL.md · 107 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 107 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Job Babysitter

Purpose

Stop manually polling long-running background jobs. Instead of dozens-to-hundreds of ls -lh / ps checks while guessing at completion, start one background watcher that detects the terminal state via plateau heuristics, then routes a verdict — done, needs-attention, or blocked — with the exact next command.

A night-shift nurse for background jobs: it checks vitals on a schedule and escalates only when something is actually wrong.

When to use

Use when a job will run long enough that babysitting it by hand wastes attention:

  • Media encodes / transcodes (ffmpeg, video-transcribe, audio extraction)
  • Embedding or vector-DB builds (qmd embed, index builds)
  • Batch agent / LLM pipelines run in the background
  • Browser / scrape daemons (real-browser, agent-browser) prone to hanging

Do NOT use for jobs that finish in seconds, or where a single Bash call already returns the result.

Core principle: stay thin, lean on the harness

This skill orchestrates Claude Code's own primitives — do not reimplement them:

  • Start the watcher with run_in_background: true. When it exits, the harness re-invokes the agent automatically — no manual polling loop needed.
  • The watcher (scripts/watch_job.py) owns the deterministic part: poll with backoff, detect plateau, distinguish done from stuck, emit a verdict JSON.
  • The skill's value is the per-job-type heuristics, the safe-recovery playbook, and notification routing — all in references/playbook.md.

Workflow

1. Identify the job's signals

Determine what can be watched, in order of reliability:

  • PID — the process ID (most reliable completion signal). Get it from the job's launch, pgrep, or ps.
  • Output file — a file that grows as the job progresses (e.g. ffmpeg target).
  • Log file — a log that gets appended (e.g. an embed progress log).

Read references/playbook.md § "Completion heuristics by job type" to pick flags for the specific job type (ffmpeg, embed, batch, browser).

Read the full file on GitHub · 107 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 8d ago First seen · 107 lines · 147 tokens per session scan A be45a1ed8c1c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

job-babysitter is a skill published in the GitHub repository glebis/claude-skills (375 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 147 tokens to every session and 1,358 once invoked, about $0.0007 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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