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.
npx agentmods add skills/harshanandak/forge/smithnpx skills add harshanandak/forge --skill smithgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/harshanandak/forgeWhat 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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00192 | $0.02024 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00096 | $0.01012 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00038 | $0.00405 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00019 | $0.00202 |
Grade A, and why
smith 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 151 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Smith — the orchestrator super-skill
Smith is a thin orchestrator. It adds no stage behaviour of its own; every step
below is an existing skill or forge verb. What smith contributes is judgement:
which path to take for this piece of work, and how densely to involve the human.
It is maximally driving between gates and deliberately stops at them — the goal is
conversational autonomy, not unattended autonomy.
Keep the word "kernel" internal — it is the event store under the hood, not a term users should see.
Deeper lookup tables live in references/autonomy-and-gates.md: read that when you calibrate a specific issue or need the exact gate IDs and commands.
The orchestration procedure
-
Pick the work with
triage-ready. Rank the ready queue (forge issue ready --json) and explain why the top pick is genuinely workable. Readiness is a derived model, so recompute it each time rather than trusting a remembered "ready" — you want the item that is actually unblocked now, not a stale guess. Hand off one issue. -
Claim it, then prove you own it, with
claim-safety.FORGE_ACTOR=<actor> forge claim <id>, thenforge issue owns <id>(exit 0 = owned). A claim returningok:trueis not proof — a duplicate replay returnsok:truetoo, and a live lease can be reclaimed once it expires. Proving ownership is what stops two agents from quietly working the same issue. If you are not the owner, don't work it; reselect viatriage-ready. -
Calibrate autonomy during planning. Read the issue's size × importance × complexity, map it to a tier (lean / standard / high), and propose that tier directly to the human — a short "here's how much oversight I think this needs." This proposal is a plain conversational checkpoint at the start of planning; it is deliberately not itself one of the enforcement gates, so it stays reachable even for the Lean tier (which may require no intent gate at all). The human confirms or overrides, and the chosen tier decides which enforcement gates you require approval for on this issue (step 5). Keep the two mechanisms distinct:
forge gate enable|disable <gate>is the repo-wide default (a gate the user turned off is always skipped), whereas the per-issue tier is your runtime decision about which of the still-enabled gates to actually require for this one issue. Matching checkpoint density to stakes is the whole point: a docs typo should not drag through a full brainstorm, and a risky refactor should not run unattended. When your read is uncertain, lean toward more gates — an extra approval costs seconds, a missing one can cost a lot of rework. See the reference for the tier → gate mapping.
What ships with it
3 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.
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.
- 2d ago First seen · 151 lines · 192 tokens per session scan A 9b505b9087dc
smith is a skill published in the GitHub repository harshanandak/forge (4 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 192 tokens to every session and 2,024 once invoked, about $0.0010 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.
Other skills, from other repositories
systematic-debugging
Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.
brainstorming
You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior. Explores user intent, requirements and design before implementation.
auto-perf-optimize
Run agent-driven VS Code performance or memory investigations. Use when asked to launch Code OSS, automate a VS Code scenario, run the Chat memory smoke runner, capture renderer heap snapshots, take workflow screenshots, compare run summaries, or drive a repeatable scenario before heap-snapshot analysis.
chat-perf
Run chat perf benchmarks and memory leak checks against the local dev build or any published VS Code version. Use when investigating chat rendering regressions, validating perf-sensitive changes to chat UI, or checking for memory leaks in the chat response pipeline.
chat-pet-sprite-creation
Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.
cpu-profile-analysis
Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…