A way for two different coding agents to work together on one task, with one leading and the other reviewing or helping. It can keep the partnership active across separate work sessions.

Use it for paired coding, review, problem solving, and workflows that send messages between agents. It supports Claude, Codex, Cursor, Grok, and OpenCode, with visible or background sessions.

It gives you a second agent's input instead of relying on one agent's reasoning. It also supports continuing the same partnership after a session loses its context.

pair — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by hcaiano: A way for two different coding agents to work…

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/hcaiano/skills/pair

Any agent

npx skills add hcaiano/skills --skill pair

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hcaiano/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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hcaiano/skills/pair.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hcaiano/skills/pair)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hcaiano/skills/pair"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hcaiano/skills/pair.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Per session 83 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,659 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5	$0.00083	$0.01659
Opus 5	$0.00042	$0.00830
Sonnet 5	$0.00017	$0.00332
Haiku 4.5	$0.00008	$0.00166

Measured 4d ago against content hash 42c7b5a02a22, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pair 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 4d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 9 executable files (scripts/agent-process.mjs, scripts/agent-process.test.mjs, scripts/caller-proof.mjs, …), 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/pair/SKILL.md · 148 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 148 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Pair

Pair two agents on one task: you are the lead, and the partner is one of claude, codex, cursor, grok, or opencode — any of them except the CLI you are already running, because two panes of one CLI echo rather than review. Keep the pair and its sid alive across tasks, accepted work cycles, and context compaction, naming its sid in every command — one lead can run several pairs at once. Keep protocol headers and identifiers literal.

The refusal is based only on the CLI kind. Two different harnesses may use the same underlying model or provider and still form a valid pair.

Two backends carry the same protocol. Inside Herdr the partner is a visible pane the user can read and interject in; outside it the partner is a persistent headless session of the partner CLI.

Choose the pair

Look for an existing pair before proposing one: a session recorded for this Herdr tab, or a headless one in this repository (the backend reference names the exact command). Before a new work cycle, read the measured pool state as defined in references/models.md. Resume an existing pair when its pool is available. When its pool is protected, state its use, pace, and reset, then ask whether to spend it or end the session and choose another partner. When its partner, model, or effort differs from what the user just asked for, say so and keep going — respawning discards the pair's whole history, and a model is changed by ending the pair, not by restarting its pane.

With no pair to resume, ask the user in plain chat text — no structured-question tool needed — for three things, and start nothing until they answer. Read pool state first and do not recommend a protected or unavailable pool. The user may explicitly choose a protected pool after you state its use, pace, and reset:

Partner: which of the five CLIs, other than yours.
Model: CLI default, or any model name they name. When choosing a model, effort, or pool, read references/models.md; it owns the risk, speed, context, catalog, and effort rubric. For a cursor partner run cursor-agent --list-models; for Grok run grok models; for OpenCode run opencode models; for the others take the user's answer as given.
Effort: only for a partner that exposes it — Claude Code (--effort low|medium|high|xhigh|max), grok (--reasoning-effort), codex (model_reasoning_effort), or cursor (an [effort=…] suffix on the model name, so it needs a model too), or OpenCode (--variant on headless opencode run; its Herdr TUI does not expose this flag).

Read the full file on GitHub · 148 lines

Files

What ships with it

21 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.

4d ago First seen · 148 lines · 83 tokens per session scan A 42c7b5a02a22

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pair is a skill published in the GitHub repository hcaiano/skills (3 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 83 tokens to every session and 1,659 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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