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/Junhanliu-dev/espalier-engineeringnpx agentmods add skills/junhanliu-dev/espalier-engineering/espalier-initWrote 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/junhanliu-dev/espalier-engineering/espalier-init)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/junhanliu-dev/espalier-engineering/espalier-init"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/junhanliu-dev/espalier-engineering/espalier-init/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/junhanliu-dev/espalier-engineering/espalier-init"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/junhanliu-dev/espalier-engineering/espalier-init.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 10 findings, up to medium
These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →
- medium Agent Snooping · line 112 Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
- medium Agent Snooping · line 399 Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
- medium Agent Snooping · line 113 Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
- medium Agent Snooping · line 401 Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
- medium Agent Snooping · line 114 Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
- medium Agent Snooping · line 117 Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
- medium Agent Snooping · line 118 Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
- medium Agent Snooping · line 400 Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
- medium Agent Snooping · line 402 Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
- medium Rogue Agent · line 472 Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
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 | $0.00118 | $0.11337 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00047 | $0.04535 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00024 | $0.02267 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00012 | $0.01134 |
Grade A, and why
espalier-init 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 4d 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 — 677 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Espalier Init
Discover the actual patterns, conventions, and architecture of an existing codebase, then generate a structured constraint system that ensures AI agents produce code matching those standards.
When to Use
- "Set up Espalier for this project"
- "Create Espalier structure for my codebase"
- "Make AI code production-ready for this repo"
- "Build agent constraints for this project"
- "/espalier-init"
- "/espalier-init --outside" — install with the
espalier/tree OUTSIDE the repo (nothing espalier-related committed)
Flags
| Flag | Effect |
|---|---|
--outside[=<dir>] |
Outside mode (v0.30). The espalier/ tree lives at <dir>/<name>/espalier/ — default <dir> is the project's PARENT directory + /espalier-main, created if missing — with its own local git repo (no remote). The project root gets a RELATIVE symlink espalier -> ../espalier-main/<name>/espalier, excluded via .git/info/exclude. Hooks go to .claude/settings.local.json, the instruction section to CLAUDE.local.md, every wiring path to the exclude file: the project repo never tracks anything espalier-related, and Stage 7 commits records into the outside repo instead of opening an espalier PR. Fresh installs only — an existing inside install moves with /espalier-repot. |
--outside-name=<n> |
Outside mode: the folder name under <dir> (default: the project's basename). Pass it when two projects share a basename — init refuses to adopt a root whose .espalier-origin names another project. |
Outside mode has ONE extra step, and it comes FIRST. Phase 2 writes
espalier/rules/…, espalier/agents/… and the rest by path, so the symlink
must exist before any of those writes — otherwise they create a real
directory inside the repo. Immediately after Phase 0's questions, before
Phase 1:
# ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR} = this skill's directory. Append --main=<dir> when
# --outside=<dir> was given, --name=<n> when --outside-name=<n> was given.
bash "${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/hook-templates/espalier-outside.sh" prepare .
What ships with it
60 files 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.
- hook-templates/check-layer-boundaries-go.sh 665 B runs code
- hook-templates/check-layer-boundaries-python.sh 821 B runs code
- hook-templates/check-layer-boundaries-typescript.sh 1.6 KB runs code
- hook-templates/copilot-hook-adapter.sh 2.4 KB runs code
- hook-templates/drift-detect.sh 5.7 KB runs code
- hook-templates/drift-helpers.sh 56 KB runs code
- hook-templates/espalier-outside.sh 29 KB runs code
- hook-templates/espalier-pr.sh 43 KB runs code
- hook-templates/espalier-stats.sh 27 KB runs code
- hook-templates/lookup-helpers.sh 9.5 KB runs code
- hook-templates/map-guard.sh 3.9 KB runs code
- hook-templates/maprun-dispatch.sh 21 KB runs code
- hook-templates/maprun-integration.sh 3.4 KB runs code
- hook-templates/maprun-merge.sh 2.9 KB runs code
- hook-templates/maprun-pr.sh 13 KB runs code
- hook-templates/maprun-verify.sh 5.0 KB runs code
- hook-templates/maprun.py 66 KB runs code
- hook-templates/parse-drift-blocks.py 1.1 KB runs code
- hook-templates/post-edit-wrapper.sh 2.0 KB runs code
- hook-templates/post-merge-backlink.sh 2.2 KB runs code
- hook-templates/pre-push-gate-wrapper.sh 3.0 KB runs code
- hook-templates/pre-push-gate.sh 18 KB runs code
- hook-templates/rebuild-commit-index.sh 2.6 KB runs code
- references/discovery-checklist.md 18 KB
- references/validation.md 17 KB
- references/wiki-templates.md 710 B
- references/wiring.md 14 KB
- templates/agent.md 3.7 KB
- templates/agents/harness-coder.md 34 KB
- templates/agents/harness-reviewer.md 25 KB
- templates/agents/harness-security.md 14 KB
- templates/agents/modes/fix-round.md 3.0 KB
- templates/agents/modes/re-review.md 5.3 KB
- templates/agents/modes/repo-audit.md 2.8 KB
- templates/agents/modes/simplification.md 7.0 KB
- templates/agents/modes/stage6-abuse-coverage.md 1.3 KB
- templates/agents/modes/wiki-sweep.md 5.6 KB
- templates/pipeline.md 19 KB
- templates/rules/coding-standards.md 3.2 KB
- templates/rules/development-process.md 3.2 KB
- templates/rules/engineering-structure.md 1008 B
- templates/rules/production-standards.md 5.8 KB
- templates/rules/security-standards.md 5.6 KB
- templates/scout-prompts.md 9.0 KB
- templates/skills/espalier-ask.md 6.4 KB
- templates/skills/espalier-audit.md 10.0 KB
- templates/skills/espalier-coding-references/platform-native.md 9.4 KB
- templates/skills/espalier-coding-spec.md 496 B
- templates/skills/espalier-coding.md 4.0 KB
- templates/skills/espalier-doctor.md 8.0 KB
- templates/skills/espalier-fix.md 78 KB
- templates/skills/espalier-grill.md 21 KB
- templates/skills/espalier-map.md 20 KB
- templates/skills/espalier-maprun.md 31 KB
- templates/skills/espalier-prune.md 13 KB
- templates/skills/espalier-repot.md 7.6 KB
- templates/skills/espalier-requirements.md 4.7 KB
- templates/skills/espalier-review.md 4.5 KB
- templates/skills/espalier-security.md 5.6 KB
- templates/skills/espalier-simplify.md 25 KB
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.
- 4d ago Changed · +57 lines c85b48db435e
- 6d ago Changed cecfae4657f1
- 1mo ago Changed · +1 lines 55638bc3b7c8
- 1mo ago Changed · +2 lines 4953ccb9ea98
- 1mo ago Changed · +1 lines ee1a6a83a6fe
- 1mo ago First seen · 616 lines · 118 tokens per session scan A b6a37217308c
espalier-init is a skill published in the GitHub repository Junhanliu-dev/espalier-engineering (69 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 118 tokens to every session and 11,337 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.
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