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-orientWrote 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-orient)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hmbown/codewhale/cw-orient"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hmbown/codewhale/cw-orient.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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 | $0.00043 | $0.01098 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00022 | $0.00549 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00009 | $0.00220 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00110 |
Grade A, and why
cw-orient 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 today.
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 — 100 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
cw-orient
Open every session on live truth, not on a handoff note, a directory name, or what was true last time. This repo runs many worktrees at once; the cheapest bug to avoid is editing the wrong one. Five commands, then you know where you are.
This is stage 1 of the loop: orient → cw-slice → cw-gates → cw-dogfood → cw-land → cw-handoff.
When to use
- Starting a session, resuming one, or taking over from another agent.
- A handoff, issue, or plan tells you the state of the repo — verify before trusting it.
- You are about to edit and are not certain this checkout owns the files.
Workflow
-
Locate yourself. Checkout, branch, dirt, and how far you are from the remote:
git rev-parse --show-toplevel && git branch --show-current git status --short --branch git log --oneline --decorate -10A detached HEAD or a branch with no upstream is normal here — note it, don't "fix" it silently.
-
See the other lanes. Worktree sprawl is the standing hazard: several checkouts of this repo are usually live, each with its own dirty state.
git worktree list git branch --sort=-committerdate --format='%(committerdate:short) %(refname:short)' | head -20If the work you were asked to do already has a worktree, use it. Do not start a second copy of the same lane.
-
Read the dirt before you touch it. Modified files you did not write belong to someone else — another agent, another lane, an in-flight slice:
git status --porcelain git diff --statPreserve them. Leave them unstaged, and do not
git checkout --or stash another writer's work to get a clean tree. If your change genuinely conflicts with the dirt, work in a fresh worktree instead. -
Fix which guidance applies. The nearest scoped
AGENTS.mdwins over the root one, and it is where the per-area rules actually live:find . -name AGENTS.md -not -path './tmp/*' -not -path '*/node_modules/*' -not -path './target/*'Today: root
AGENTS.md,crates/tui/AGENTS.md,crates/tui/locales/AGENTS.md,web/AGENTS.md. Read the one that owns the files you are about to touch.
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.
- today First seen · 100 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A 5ae1554b2cac
cw-orient is a skill published in the GitHub repository Hmbown/Codewhale (40,916 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 1,098 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-09-06.
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-close-issues
Close resolved Codewhale issues only after verifying the landed commit/behavior, with a positive crediting comment; never from title alone.
gh-find-prs
Survey open Codewhale PRs and triage each for mergeability and disposition against the real landing branch.
gh-assign-issues
Use to assign GitHub issues to a milestone and/or owners in bulk, verifying each.
gh-credit-harvest
Harvest one community PR into a release branch with authorship and credit preserved, verified green, and a warm thank-you.