mb-cli

A guide for using the mb command-line tool with Micro.blog, a blogging and social platform. It explains how to read feeds and inboxes, manage follows, discover users, and build pipelines while separating reading from social actions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Checking session status, reading timelines and inboxes, catching up, finding users or collections, enriching results, and managing Micro.blog workflows.
Why use it?
It helps choose appropriate mb commands, avoid expensive lookups, and handle public interactions deliberately.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jthingelstad/mb/mb-cli
Any agent
npx skills add jthingelstad/mb --skill mb-cli
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jthingelstad/mb

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 48 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 927 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00048 $0.00927
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00464
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00185
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00093

Measured 2d ago against content hash d05b79cadbe7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

mb-cli 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 2d 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.

skills/mb-cli/SKILL.md · 152 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 152 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

mb CLI

Use this skill whenever the task involves mb.

Core rules

  • Start most agent sessions with mb heartbeat.
  • Use mb inbox when deciding whether something deserves a reply.
  • Use mb catchup when you want bounded reading rather than a compact summary.
  • Default to agent output for exploration and pipelines.
  • Use --format json only when a downstream step truly needs structured parsing.
  • Prefer cheap list/read commands first.
  • Make expensive fan-out explicit with mb lookup ....
  • Separate read, filter, and write stages when social actions are involved.

Cheap first, expensive second

Cheap reads:

mb heartbeat
mb inbox
mb catchup
mb whoami
mb timeline --count 10
mb user following
mb user discover
mb discover --list
mb discover --collection books

Explicit enrichment:

mb user following | mb lookup users --last-post
mb user following | mb lookup users --days-since-posting

Heartbeat workflow

  • mb heartbeat is the default session-start check for agent use.
  • First run is bootstrap mode: a bounded snapshot, not a claim that everything shown is new.
  • Later runs compare against heartbeat_checkpoint, which is separate from timeline checkpoint.
  • Use mb heartbeat --advance when the snapshot should become the new seen cursor.
  • Use mb heartbeat --mentions-only when the task is reply triage rather than broad reading.
  • Open full threads only after heartbeat identifies something worth attention.

Inbox and catchup

  • mb inbox is the reply-triage surface.
  • mb catchup is the bounded read-what-is-new surface.
  • mb inbox, mb catchup, and mb heartbeat each use separate checkpoints.
  • Use mb checkpoint list when cursor state is unclear.
  • Use mb checkpoint clear <name> to reset a stuck workflow cursor.
  • Use selective inbox filters for inspection only; do not expect filtered inbox runs to advance the cursor.
  • Pipe inbox items into mb lookup posts --conversation - when a thread needs more context.

Read the full file on GitHub · 152 lines

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. 2d ago First seen · 152 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A d05b79cadbe7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

mb-cli is a skill published in the GitHub repository jthingelstad/mb (4 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 927 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 2026-08-31.

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