repo-gardener

repo-gardener is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from jrgilbertson/the-rookery. It costs 88 tokens per session (2,945 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured maintenance review for one software repository, the project folder containing its code and history. It surveys maintenance areas, assigns separate work, records findings, and checks the results without implementing or merging changes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find maintenance work, decide which items deserve action, create independently reviewable pull requests, and produce a summary of the repository's health.
Why use it?
It gives routine repository upkeep a repeatable process and keeps maintenance decisions, work assignments, and reviewable changes organized.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions subagents; $skill-name invocation.

Good fit Use it to find maintenance work, decide which items deserve action, create independently reviewable pull requests, and produce a summary of the repository's health.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jrgilbertson/the-rookery/repo-gardener
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.

Any agent
npx skills add jrgilbertson/the-rookery --skill repo-gardener
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jrgilbertson/the-rookery

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.

agentmods badge for repo-gardener

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jrgilbertson/the-rookery/repo-gardener/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jrgilbertson/the-rookery/repo-gardener)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jrgilbertson/the-rookery/repo-gardener"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jrgilbertson/the-rookery/repo-gardener/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for repo-gardener

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jrgilbertson/the-rookery/repo-gardener"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jrgilbertson/the-rookery/repo-gardener.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 88 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,945 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00088 $0.02945
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.01473
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00589
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00295

Measured today against content hash dfa54c132550, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

repo-gardener 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.

skills/repo-gardener/SKILL.md · 229 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 229 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Repo Gardener

Start only when the request names repo-gardener, its /repo-gardener or $repo-gardener form, the repository gardening automation, or the nightly gardener. Treat a request about maintenance, CI, repository health, trackers, issues, or overnight work that names none of these as not this skill.

Sense one repository, dispatch Executors that each ship one reviewable PR, and post one morning report. Run as Lead plus Executors. As Lead, sense, select, dispatch, answer readiness menus, and report. Never implement, push, or merge as Lead. Give each Executor one worktree, one branch, and one unmerged PR. Use Scouts for read-only evidence. Each Executor runs PR readiness on its own head. Use a fresh Reviewer to judge merge readiness. Keep CI as the merge gate. Leave merge to a human. Treat a run that authors nothing but reports as a complete run.

Read the policy

Read .agents/repo-gardener.yaml on the refreshed default branch once at the start. If the default branch cannot be refreshed, read the last fetched local copy of the default branch and name that in the report. Never read the policy from a topic branch or a dirty checkout; without a default-branch copy, run sense-only. Treat that file as the only durable policy. Read protected_paths as globs an Executor never writes. Treat the policy file itself as always protected. Read max_pull_requests as the number of pull requests one run may open, one Executor each, with 0 meaning sense and report only. Read scans as a list of argv lists, each one process run from the repository root. Read verify as the argv lists the owner approves for an Executor to verify its unit, each run from the worktree root; this is the exact caller-approved verification command argv list that checking-pr-readiness needs, and without it Approve is withheld. Read optional report_issue as a GitHub issue number that receives one report comment per run.

Treat a missing or unreadable file as a sense-only run. Put a proposed complete policy file in that report for the owner to commit. Start from the bundled policy template. Fill scans with whole-project scans nothing else runs on a schedule, and verify with the smallest gating subset CI runs on pull requests, never a watch-mode command. Do not validate the file with a script. Treat a readable file in which protected_paths, max_pull_requests, scans, or verify is missing, misspelled, repeated as a duplicate top-level key, or not of its expected type as unreadable: run sense-only and name that field in the report.

Read the full file on GitHub · 229 lines

Files

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.

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.

  1. today Changed · +106 lines · +17 tokens per session dfa54c132550
  2. 2d ago Changed · -2 lines 83a8eb646258
  3. 4d ago Changed · -2 lines · -29 tokens per session 287501229bc3
  4. 5d ago Changed · -6 lines · -8 tokens per session a0865131df2e
  5. 7d ago Changed · -241 lines · -16 tokens per session 165293aefa6e
  6. 12d ago First seen · 374 lines · 124 tokens per session scan A d57b5d176013

Subscribe to this mod's changes

repo-gardener is a skill published in the GitHub repository jrgilbertson/the-rookery (5 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 88 tokens to every session and 2,945 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.