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.
npx agentmods add skills/microsoft/apm/shepherd-drivernpx skills add microsoft/apm --skill shepherd-drivergit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/apmWhat 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 | $0.00193 | $0.02696 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00097 | $0.01348 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00039 | $0.00539 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00019 | $0.00270 |
Grade A, and why
shepherd-driver 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 220 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
shepherd-driver - per-PR drive-to-merge convergence loop
This SKILL.md is the natural-language module derived from a genesis design packet; refactors re-run the genesis skill from that packet.
This skill is a COMPOSED BUILDING BLOCK, not a user-facing entrypoint. It was extracted (genesis R3 EXTRACT) from batch-bug-shepherd when a second consumer (apm-issue-autopilot) needed the same per-PR convergence loop. Both orchestrators COMPOSE this skill; neither re-implements the loop. It in turn COMPOSES the apm-review-panel skill for the review pass -- it does NOT re-implement panel review.
Boundary (what this skill does and does NOT do)
DOES: take ONE PR that already exists and drive it to a terminal
landing-ready state; resolve cross-PR merge conflicts; emit the
PR-facing advisory and supersede comments; return a schema-valid
completion_return.
Does NOT: triage issues, decide which issues are worth fixing, open the first PR for an issue, choose the batch, or maintain the orchestrator's ground-truth table. Those are the parent orchestrator's responsibility. If you find yourself triaging or opening greenfield PRs, you are in the wrong skill.
How an orchestrator composes this skill
The parent orchestrator, for each PR in its batch, spawns ONE
shepherd-driver subagent with the spawn body in
assets/shepherd-driver-prompt.md.
The orchestrator passes the inputs that prompt declares (PR_NUMBER,
ISSUE_NUMBER, AUTHOR, HEAD_REPO, HEAD_BRANCH, MAINTAINER_CAN_MODIFY,
REPO_ROOT, ORIGIN, optional PANEL_PRIOR). The subagent owns the whole
convergence loop end-to-end and returns a completion_return.
After every shepherded PR returns ready-to-merge, the orchestrator
runs the conflict-resolution phase: probe mergeability and, on
DIRTY / BEHIND / CONFLICTING, spawn one conflict-resolution subagent
per assets/conflict-resolution-prompt.md.
The step-by-step gate procedure is in
references/mergeability-gate.md
(load it when entering that phase).
What ships with it
10 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.
- apm.yml 1.3 KB
- assets/ci-recovery-checklist.md 3.9 KB
- assets/completion-schema.json 22 KB
- assets/conflict-resolution-prompt.md 8.7 KB
- assets/copilot-classification-prompt.md 3.7 KB
- assets/fold-vs-defer-rubric.md 4.8 KB
- assets/pr-comment-templates.md 5.7 KB
- assets/shepherd-driver-prompt.md 30 KB
- references/mergeability-gate.md 6.9 KB
- scripts/owner_touch_gate.py 30 KB runs code
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.
- 2d ago First seen · 220 lines · 193 tokens per session scan A 71773e1ad047
shepherd-driver is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/apm (3,687 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 193 tokens to every session and 2,696 once invoked, about $0.0010 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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