Codewhale is an open-source coding agent that runs in the terminal and can read repositories, edit files, execute commands, and inspect results while pursuing a task. Developers use it with hosted providers or local models, with controls for how much access it receives.
Getting it into your agent
It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Hmbown/Codewhalenpx agentmods add skills/hmbown/codewhale/cw-handoffWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hmbown/codewhale/cw-handoff)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hmbown/codewhale/cw-handoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hmbown/codewhale/cw-handoff/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hmbown/codewhale/cw-handoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hmbown/codewhale/cw-handoff.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
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 41 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.
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 5.1 | $0.00050 | $0.01014 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00020 | $0.00406 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00203 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00101 |
Grade A, and why
cw-handoff 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 1mo 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 — 90 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
cw-handoff
A handoff is read by an agent with none of your context and every incentive to believe you. That makes an optimistic handoff worse than no handoff: it converts your guesses into the next session's premises. Write it so the reader can re-derive the state instead of trusting the prose.
Stage 6 of the loop, and the one that makes the loop a loop: the next session starts at cw-orient with what you leave here.
When to use
- Ending a session with work in flight.
- Asked for "a prompt for another agent", branch takeover instructions, a continuation note, or a summary of current state for async work.
- Handing a lane to a different model, a fleet worker, or a remote session.
Workflow
-
Write it as a prompt the next agent can paste directly. Not a report about the work — instructions for continuing it.
-
Open with the refresh block, not with your summary. The first thing the reader should do is verify you:
cd <repo path> git status --short --branch && git branch --show-current git log --oneline --decorate -20 git worktree list ./scripts/release/check-versions.shTell them to trust that output over anything below it.
-
Cover these, in whatever order fits; drop sections that are empty:
- Repository path and expected branch or worktree.
- The authority line: what they may and may not do without asking. Default to local-only — no push, merge, tag, publish, GitHub Release, or destructive cleanup without explicit approval.
- Durable files to read, ordered by importance: the scoped
AGENTS.mdfor the area, then the specific docs (docs/CACHE.md,docs/MOTION_CONTRACT.md,docs/ARCHITECTURE.md,crates/tui/AGENTS.md) the task actually touches. - Commits already landed, with SHAs.
- Dirty worktree caveats, naming uncommitted files explicitly, and whose they are. This is the single most useful line in most handoffs.
- The next slices, in priority order, each bounded the way cw-slice bounds one.
- The verification gate for those slices — the smallest correct one from cw-gates, plus any known-flaky names.
- Open decisions that genuinely belong to Hunter.
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.
- 1mo ago Changed · +2 lines d91af0147c7a
- 1mo ago First seen · 88 lines · 50 tokens per session scan A 33ddb57a0a77
cw-handoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository Hmbown/Codewhale (41,035 stars, last pushed 19d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 50 tokens to every session and 1,014 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-09-06.
Other skills, from other repositories
contributor-onboarding
Help a new contributor get productive on this checkout - inspect sync state against main, build, run the repository's exact verification gate, and produce a local what's-new digest. Never fetches, pulls, or modifies a dirty tree on its own. Explicit-only.
codew-release-qa-sweep
Use before claiming Codewhale release work is done: run the full gate sweep and list the manual QA targets.
gh-compile-issues
Triage N GitHub issues into a coverage matrix: fetch each, check current code, classify already-done/quick-fix/design/defer with cited evidence.
gh-file-issue
Use when filing a new Codewhale GitHub issue: turn a bug or idea into a well-formed, actionable issue with repro, acceptance criteria, labels, and milestone.
gh-find-prs
Survey open Codewhale PRs and triage each for mergeability and disposition against the real landing branch.
best-of-n
Generate a small set of independent candidate solutions in worktrees, judge them against one explicit rubric, and apply the winner only after PASS verification.