watch-tag

watch-tag is a skill for Claude Code from justincampbell/gh-watch. It costs 62 tokens per session (1,139 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A GitHub tag monitor that reports when matching tags appear in a repository. A tag is a named marker in Git, often used to identify a release such as v1.2.0.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to watch all matching release tags or wait for a tag whose history contains a particular commit.
Why use it?
It removes the need to repeatedly check whether a release was created or whether a merged commit has reached a release tag.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: argument-hint in frontmatter.

Part of the gh-watch plugin — 4 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to watch all matching release tags or wait for a tag whose history contains a particular commit.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/justincampbell/gh-watch/watch-tag
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 justincampbell/gh-watch --skill watch-tag
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/justincampbell/gh-watch

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install gh-watch, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 skills.

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 watch-tag

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/justincampbell/gh-watch/watch-tag/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/justincampbell/gh-watch/watch-tag)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/justincampbell/gh-watch/watch-tag"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/justincampbell/gh-watch/watch-tag/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 watch-tag

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/justincampbell/gh-watch/watch-tag"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/justincampbell/gh-watch/watch-tag.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 62 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,139 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 $0.00062 $0.01139
Opus 5 $0.00031 $0.00570
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00228
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00114

Measured 11d ago against content hash ce35a3e4c0e9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

watch-tag 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 11d 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.

plugin/skills/watch-tag/SKILL.md · 97 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 97 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Watch Tags

Monitor a repository's tags using the gh watch CLI extension. It polls GitHub and emits one JSON event per line to stdout when a new tag appears, which makes it a natural fit for the Monitor tool — each event arrives in the conversation as a notification.

Two modes:

  • All new tags--match '<glob>' filters tag names (e.g. v*). Every new matching tag is reported.
  • Tags containing a commit--contains <sha> reports only tags whose commit includes <sha> in its history. This answers "which release includes my merged commit?" If such a tag already exists when watching starts, it is reported immediately with "preexisting": true.

Prerequisites

Check if the extension is installed:

gh watch --help

If not installed:

gh extension install justincampbell/gh-watch

Usage

Run with the Monitor tool (not Bash with run_in_background). The first notification is the initial-state snapshot; subsequent notifications are tag-created events.

Wait for the release tag that includes a merged commit, then exit:

  • command: gh watch tag --match 'v*' --contains <sha> --exit-on tag-created
  • description: Release tag containing <short-sha>
  • persistent: false
  • timeout_ms: 7200000 (2 hours — raise/lower based on how long releases take)

Watch for every new release tag for the rest of the session:

  • command: gh watch tag --match 'v*'
  • description: New v* tags
  • persistent: true (no timeout — stop with TaskStop or end of session)

Composing with gh watch commit

A tag-created event tells you the tag exists — not that its CI or deploy finished. To follow what happens after the tag, take the sha from the tag-created event and hand off to the commit watcher:

gh watch commit <tag-sha> --exit-on ci-passed,ci-failed

Flags

Flag Description Default
--match <glob> Filter tag names (*, ?, […]) all tags
--contains <sha> Only report tags whose commit contains this commit
--interval <duration> Polling interval 60s
--exit Exit after any state change false
--exit-on <events> Exit after specific event types (comma-separated)

Read the full file on GitHub · 97 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. 11d ago First seen · 97 lines · 62 tokens per session scan A ce35a3e4c0e9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

watch-tag is a skill published in the GitHub repository justincampbell/gh-watch (4 stars, last pushed 23d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 62 tokens to every session and 1,139 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.