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 JKHeadley/instar --skill test-as-selfgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JKHeadley/instarWrote 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/jkheadley/instar/test-as-self)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jkheadley/instar/test-as-self"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jkheadley/instar/test-as-self.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 | $0.00065 | $0.01544 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00032 | $0.00772 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00013 | $0.00309 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00006 | $0.00154 |
Grade C, and why
test-as-self scanned grade C with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Recursive force deletehighDestructive command
rm -rf with a variable or a broad path is one typo away from removing the wrong tree.
rm -rf "$TEST_DIR" How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 111 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
/test-as-self — Throwaway-Deploy Harness (Part 2.1)
Spec:
docs/specs/SELF-PROPAGATION-HARNESS-SPEC.md+ the Track F section ofdocs/specs/MULTI-MACHINE-BOOTSTRAP-ROBUSTNESS-SPEC.md. Part 1 (the structural poll-ownership lease) ships alongside. Part 2.1 folded the manual recipe below into a single command — use that first; the manual recipe is the fallback for fine-grained control.
The one-button path (Part 2.1 — use this first)
instar test-as-self --no-roundtrip # deploy + verify only (no bot)
instar test-as-self --bot-token <secret-drop-id> # + a real Telegram round-trip
instar test-as-self --keep # leave it running for inspection
The command runs the seven gated steps automatically (bot-acquire via Secret Drop / target-prep with Bob+canonical-home guards / dist-deploy / process-start + wait for /health + lease / Telegram-Bot-HTTP-API round-trip / verify.mjs / signal-safe teardown) and emits a single JSON report; exit 0 = all PASS. Structural guards make it impossible to target your real agent home or Bob, and it refuses a raw bot token on the command line (Secret Drop only). The round-trip uses the Telegram Bot HTTP API directly (not Playwright) — no browser, no flake.
Fall back to the manual recipe below only when you need step-by-step control or to debug a single step.
When to use
- Verifying Part 1 of the spec — does the server actually auto-demote to send-only when the lifeline owns the poll slot? (Run this skill against any deploy that bundles Part 1.)
- Before shipping a change to the deploy / lifeline / server-startup path — clean evidence beats guessing.
- Reproducing a crash observed in the wild — the verifier captures crashes deterministically (server.log + lifeline.log tail for FATAL / OOM / heap signatures), so you get the real signature instead of post-hoc forensic guessing.
Why a runbook, not a one-button command (v1 scope)
The deploy itself involves operator-specific choices (which throwaway dir? which bot token, if any? skip the bot? reuse a prior bot?) that resist a one-size-fits-all instar test-as-self --go for v1. The skill's verify.mjs script is the deterministic half (no operator judgment — just reads the artifacts and reports). The deploy steps are documented below as a tight, repeatable recipe. Follow-up Part 2.1 will fold the recipe + bot minting into a single CLI command.
What ships with it
1 file 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.
- 8d ago First seen · 111 lines · 65 tokens per session scan C f2757c7edd08
test-as-self is a skill published in the GitHub repository JKHeadley/instar (79 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 65 tokens to every session and 1,544 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 1 finding (recursive force delete). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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