update

A procedure for updating and restarting several installed programs, long-running services, servers, and related tools across multiple repositories and machines.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after releases or when asked to update, deploy, or restart everything, checking versions and running executable files across the listed surfaces.
Why use it?
It prevents a release from appearing complete while an installed binary, service, benchmark, client, or server is still running older code. It verifies the running programs themselves rather than trusting the source repository.

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/ljchang/mecha/update
Any agent
npx skills add ljchang/mecha --skill update
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ljchang/mecha

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 70 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,811 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. 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 $0.00070 $0.04811
Opus 5 $0.00035 $0.02405
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00962
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00481

Measured 2d ago against content hash 8b75ae5527d2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

update scanned grade A 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 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

answers 400, which reads exactly like a server bug and is your curl. Two
.claude/skills/update/SKILL.md · 371 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 371 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Updating everything

There is no single command, and that is the whole problem. "Update" names six independent surfaces on two machines from three repositories, each with its own version line. Every one of them can be stale while the others are current, and none of them complain.

The failure this skill exists to prevent, from 2026-08-15: mecha 0.1.4 was tagged, pushed, and published to crates.io, and the services were restarted — and mecha --version still said 0.1.3 afterwards, because nothing had run cargo install. Four surfaces were stale at once that day: the installed binaries, mecha-triggers (left out of the restart), the benchmark's musl binary (eight days old, so a benchmark would have measured old code and reported it as new), and the factory client.

The one rule

Verify the running thing, never the repo.

A tag proves a commit exists. A green CI run proves it compiles. git log proves someone wrote it. None of them prove that the bytes executing on this machine contain it. Ask the process what it is, not the source tree: mecha --version, ls -l ~/.cargo/bin/, /proc/<pid>/exe.

Three specific confusions worth naming, because each one has actually happened:

  • A release is not an install. Tagging and publishing changes crates.io, not ~/.cargo/bin.
  • A restart is not a reinstall. systemctl restart re-executes the same file on disk. Restarting before installing accomplishes nothing.
  • A debug build is not the one that runs. Both mecha's MCP config and the benchmark point at release paths.

The six surfaces

Work them in this order — later ones depend on earlier ones.

1. Installed binaries (~/.cargo/bin)

From ~/Github/mecha:

cargo install --path mecha-cli  --locked --force   # mecha
cargo install --path mecha-mail --locked --force   # mecha-mail, mecha-google, mecha-outlook

And the graph, from ~/Github/personalized_knowledge_graph — installed with mecha since 2026-08-16, because ~/.mecha/config.toml runs ~/.cargo/bin/mecha-graph-mcp, not a repo path.

Read the full file on GitHub · 371 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 · 371 lines · 70 tokens per session scan A 8b75ae5527d2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

update is a skill published in the GitHub repository ljchang/mecha (6 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 70 tokens to every session and 4,811 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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