swarm

swarm is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from michael-denyer/pstack-claude. It costs 41 tokens per session (690 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A procedure that sends several workers to investigate tasks in parallel and combines their results into one report. The workers can explore different parts of a problem or independently attempt the same task.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when a task benefits from multiple independent investigations, such as coverage checks, race conditions, exploratory work, or parallel reviews.
Why use it?
It reduces the time needed for broad exploration, parallel coverage, race testing, and finding competing solutions.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the pstack plugin — 54 skills, 2 agents, 1 hook shipped together

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/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/swarm
Any agent
npx skills add michael-denyer/pstack-claude --skill swarm
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/michael-denyer/pstack-claude

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install pstack, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 54 skills, 2 agents, 1 hook.

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 swarm

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/swarm.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/swarm)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/swarm"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/swarm.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 690 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 $0.00041 $0.00690
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00345
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00138
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00069

Measured yesterday against content hash 501d2f79589b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

swarm 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 yesterday.

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.

plugins/pstack/skills/swarm/SKILL.md · 55 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 55 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Swarm

Fan out N parallel workers. They may cover separate slices, race the same brief, or mix both. The parent waits, aggregates, and returns one report.

Platform note. On Codex, the Claude tool names and claude-* slugs named below are Claude defaults. Resolve them via codex-tools.md.

Start

Open a todolist with one entry per phase before launching anything.

  1. Frame
  2. Fan out
  3. Aggregate
  4. Report

Phase A: Frame

  1. State the done predicate and the artifact or report the swarm must return.
  2. Choose the shape. Partition into slices, race N workers on identical briefs, or mix both. For a race or mixed shape, declare first pass, rank all, or best-of before spawning.
  3. Set N from the user or derive it from the shape. N is total workers, not the number that run at once.
  4. Pick the worker model from swarm workers in ~/.claude/pstack-models.md when present. Otherwise use the default in Models. For a model race, name each arm's model up front.
  5. Give each worker its own writable output when it writes. Use a worktree, branch, or /tmp/swarm-<slug>/worker-<n>/.

Phase B: Fan out

Spawn all N workers in one message with subagent_type: "general-purpose", run_in_background: true, and the configured model. Claude Code subagents all run on this machine, so isolation comes from the worktree or output directory assigned in Phase A, not from a remote environment.

When a worker must start from a non-default branch, check that branch out in the worker's own worktree and name the worktree path in its brief.

Every brief stands alone. Include the goal, scope, exact slice or race arm, how to verify, and what to report. Reports use PASS, ISSUES, or BLOCKED with evidence.

If a worker drops out, proceed with N-1 and note it.

Phase C: Aggregate

Read the terminal results. For coverage, every required slice needs a result. For a race, apply the selection rule declared up front. Use first pass, rank all, or best-of. Do not paste raw worker dumps.

Read the full file on GitHub · 55 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. yesterday Changed 501d2f79589b
  2. 5d ago First seen · 55 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A c77d46930ef0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

swarm is a skill published in the GitHub repository michael-denyer/pstack-claude (195 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 690 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 2026-08-30.

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