google-agents-cli-scaffold

A command-line project starter for Google's Agent Development Kit, a toolkit for building software agents.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to start a new ADK agent project or add deployment, CI/CD, and infrastructure scaffolding to an existing one.
Why use it?
It creates the initial project structure and can add deployment or continuous-integration setup, avoiding repetitive configuration work.

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/google/agents-cli/google-agents-cli-scaffold
Any agent
npx skills add google/agents-cli --skill google-agents-cli-scaffold
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/google/agents-cli

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 137 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,595 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 $0.00137 $0.02595
Opus 5 $0.00068 $0.01298
Sonnet 5 $0.00027 $0.00519
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00260

Measured yesterday against content hash 996dbc6df215, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

google-agents-cli-scaffold 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.

skills/google-agents-cli-scaffold/SKILL.md · 248 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 248 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

ADK Project Scaffolding Guide

Requires: agents-cli (uv tool install google-agents-cli) — install uv first if needed.

Use the agents-cli CLI to create new ADK agent projects or enhance existing ones with deployment, CI/CD, and infrastructure scaffolding.


Prerequisite: Clarify Requirements (MANDATORY for new projects)

Before scaffolding a new project, load /google-agents-cli-workflow and complete Phase 0 — clarify the user's requirements before running any scaffold create command. Ask what the agent should do, what tools/APIs it needs, and whether they want a prototype or full deployment.


Step 1: Choose Architecture

Mapping user choices to CLI flags:

Choice CLI flag
Retrieval/RAG, sandboxed execution, cross-session memory, OAuth consent, guardrails, scheduled runs No flag — these come from clone-and-study recipes; see the topic index in /google-agents-cli-adk-codereferences/samples.md
A2A protocol built into every ADK agent — scaffold normally (--agent adk)
Prototype (no deployment) --prototype
Deployment target --deployment-target <agent_runtime|cloud_run|gke>
CI/CD runner --cicd-runner <github_actions|google_cloud_build>
Session storage --session-type <in_memory|cloud_sql|agent_platform_sessions>

Product name mapping

Older names → CLI values (vertexai SDK package name unchanged):

  • Agent Engine / Vertex AI Agent Engine → --deployment-target agent_runtime
  • Agent Engine sessions / Agent Platform Sessions → --session-type agent_platform_sessions
  • Vertex AI Search / Vertex AI Vector Search / RAG → clone-and-study recipe, not a flag

Removed flags. --datastore, the agentic_rag template, and agents-cli infra datastore / agents-cli data-ingestion no longer exist. If you reach for one, you want a recipe instead.


Step 2: Create or Enhance the Project

Read the full file on GitHub · 248 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. yesterday First seen · 248 lines · 137 tokens per session scan A 996dbc6df215

Subscribe to this mod's changes

google-agents-cli-scaffold is a skill published in the GitHub repository google/agents-cli (5,759 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 137 tokens to every session and 2,595 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 2026-08-30.