kernel

A map and entry point for the Forge development workflow. Forge is a command-line system that guides work through stages such as planning, test-driven development, validation, shipping, review, and post-merge checks.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when starting work, checking the project's current context, or deciding whether a task belongs to planning, coding, validation, shipping, review, or verification.
Why use it?
It helps an agent identify which workflow stage and command belongs to a task. It also explains how the separate stage tools fit together.

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/harshanandak/forge/kernel
Any agent
npx skills add harshanandak/forge --skill kernel
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/harshanandak/forge

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 240 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,671 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 $0.00240 $0.02671
Opus 5 $0.00120 $0.01336
Sonnet 5 $0.00048 $0.00534
Haiku 4.5 $0.00024 $0.00267

Measured 2d ago against content hash f474f2e73461, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

kernel 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.

.agents/skills/kernel/SKILL.md · 205 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 205 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Forge kernel surface

Forge is a TDD-first workflow harness. The agent-facing surface is skills + the forge CLI — there are no slash-command files. This umbrella skill is the entry point: it tells you which stage skill to use and which forge verb runs each day-to-day operation. Every skill is a thin guide over a real forge command; the CLI remains the implementation, the skills are the surface.

Stage skills (the TDD ladder)

The default workflow is a configurable ladder of per-stage skills. Use the whole flow when it fits, or invoke an individual stage when the active plan permits a smaller path.

Stage Skill Purpose
utility status Check current context, active work, recent completions
1 plan Design intent → research → branch + worktree + task list
2 dev Subagent-driven TDD per task (implementer → spec → quality review)
3 validate Type check, lint, code review, security, tests — all fresh output
4 ship Push branch and open the PR with design-doc reference
5 review Address ALL PR feedback (GitHub Actions, Greptile, SonarCloud)
6 verify Post-merge health check (CI on main, close issues)

Pre-merge gate (not a numbered stage): before merge, finish the doc updates on the feature branch and confirm CI is green, then hand off the PR for manual merge. The gate is embedded in ship and review — it is not a standalone skill.

Utility skills outside the linear ladder: research (deep web research), rollback (safe revert operations), sonarcloud (code-quality queries), shepherd (cross-harness PR monitoring).

Procedure skills (reusable operations any stage/agent embeds): claim-safety (claim an issue and PROVE you own the lease via forge issue owns <id> before mutating it — a claim returning ok:true does not by itself prove ownership).

status → plan → dev → validate → ship → review → verify

Chain map (each skill declares its successor)

Read the full file on GitHub · 205 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. 2d ago First seen · 205 lines · 240 tokens per session scan A f474f2e73461

Subscribe to this mod's changes

kernel is a skill published in the GitHub repository harshanandak/forge (4 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 240 tokens to every session and 2,671 once invoked, about $0.0012 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 2026-08-31.

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