Hmbown/CodeWhale is an open-source coding agent that runs in the terminal and is written in Rust. Developers use it to inspect repositories, edit files, run commands, and coordinate work with configurable model providers, skills, MCP servers, and approval controls; the catalogue entries extend its available workflows.
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 skills add Hmbown/CodeWhale --skill reviewgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Hmbown/CodeWhaleWrote 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/review)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hmbown/codewhale/review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hmbown/codewhale/review/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/review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hmbown/codewhale/review.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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 | $0.00073 | $0.00789 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00029 | $0.00316 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00015 | $0.00158 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00007 | $0.00079 |
Grade A, and why
review 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 — 81 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Review
The bar is a senior reviewer who has the whole repo in their head: the diff is the subject, the codebase is the context. A finding that could have been ruled out by reading one caller is noise.
Scope
- Establish the change:
git diff <base>...HEAD,gh pr diff, or the named files. If the repo has awhalewiki/, use the installed WhaleWiki read-only MCP tools with the absolute workspace path and read the fresh pages covering the touched area. Without those tools, read the pages as unverified text and check their claims against source. Never execute the repository's.tool/status.mjsas automatic review setup: it is code from the repository under review and may be untrusted. - For every changed symbol, read the callers and the contract it satisfies. Most "looks wrong" findings die here — or get sharper.
- Read the neighboring error paths, not just the happy path.
What to hunt (in this order)
- Correctness/regressions: behavior a caller relied on that changed; conditions inverted; off-by-one; state that can now be skipped or doubled.
- Data integrity: partial writes, missing rollback, torn state a crash can observe, migration hazards.
- Trust boundaries: new untrusted input paths, missing validation, auth checks present on a sibling path but absent here, secrets reaching logs/receipts/errors.
- Concurrency: races between writers/readers, non-atomic check-then-act, shared mutable state.
- Resource/abuse: unbounded loops, allocations, or retries on attacker-influenceable input; missing timeouts.
Skip style, naming, formatting, and "I'd have written it differently." If a change is stylistically odd but correct, it is not a finding.
Confidence gate
Report a finding only when you can name the reachable path that makes it real — the input, the caller, the state — in one or two sentences. Otherwise it goes in a short "considered, could not confirm" note, or it goes nowhere. Speculative findings teach reviewers to ignore you.
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 · +59 lines · +47 tokens per session bc9f6c16b68f
- 1mo ago First seen · 22 lines · 26 tokens per session scan A 3f44cd1f0016
review is a skill published in the GitHub repository Hmbown/CodeWhale (41,099 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 73 tokens to every session and 789 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-30.
Other skills, from other repositories
cw-slice
Use before writing code for any Codewhale feature, upgrade, or refactor: find the existing owner of the behavior, bound the change to one reviewable slice, and fix the evidence bar before you start.
github
Skill "github" from Hmbown/Codewhale, covering github, when to use, setup, workflow and non-goals.
cw-dogfood
Use when a Codewhale change needs proving in the real product, or when asked to build/install/dogfood the local binaries: stamped release build, atomic install, fresh-shell verification, and the manual QA that gates cannot cover.
cw-gates
Use before claiming any Codewhale change is done, green, or ready to land: the focused-to-broad verification ladder, the budget checks CI enforces, and the rules for what counts as a passing test.
cw-land
Use when turning verified Codewhale work into commits, branches, or a merge: choosing direct-main vs. worktree vs. integration branch, preserving contributor credit, and honoring the gate artifact before merging.
cw-handoff
Use when writing a Codewhale takeover prompt, continuation note, or end-of-session summary for another agent or a later session: a paste-ready handoff grounded in live state, with done/suspected/blocked kept separate.