watchdog

watchdog is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from mohitbadwal/ringback. It costs 96 tokens per session (4,165 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

An autonomous watchdog that monitors a long-running task and escalates notifications when attention is needed. It checks whether you are away from your Mac before moving from chat messages to alerts or a phone call.

In plain words
What is it for?
Watching deployments, scripts, or other ongoing tasks; sending chat updates; and, depending on priority and absence, sending an alert or starting a two-way call.
Why use it?
It reduces the chance of missing an important failure or decision while you are away, without interrupting you while you are actively using the laptop.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the ringback plugin — 1 skill 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/mohitbadwal/ringback/watchdog
Any agent
npx skills add mohitbadwal/ringback --skill watchdog
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mohitbadwal/ringback

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install ringback, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

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 watchdog

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mohitbadwal/ringback/watchdog.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mohitbadwal/ringback/watchdog)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mohitbadwal/ringback/watchdog"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mohitbadwal/ringback/watchdog.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 96 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,165 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 $0.00096 $0.04165
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.02083
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00833
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00417

Measured 3d ago against content hash 034da1f18cce, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

watchdog 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 3d 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/watchdog/SKILL.md · 210 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 210 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Watchdog — autonomous, presence-aware escalation

Turns this session into a watchdog: each tick it checks a watched condition, and when that condition needs you, it decides whether and how to reach you based on whether you're at the laptop. It never interrupts you while you're actively typing; it escalates only after you've gone idle and stayed idle through a short confirmation window.

Escalation ladder (how far it climbs is capped by the declared priority):

chat status  →  chat WARNING  →  phone ALERT (one-way)  →  phone CALL (two-way)
   always         user away         away + warned             away + still silent
  • priority=low → chat only, never alert/call.
  • priority=medium → may climb to phone alert (one-way SIP message / push). Default.
  • priority=critical→ may climb to phone call (live conversation).

Backends: mcp__ringback-alert__alert_me (one-way) and mcp__ringback-voice__call_start + converse (two-way) — the two MCP servers from this repo.


State file

All cross-tick state lives in ~/.claude/watchdog/state.json. Read it at the start of every tick; write it before finishing. Shape:

{
  "task": "human description of what is being watched",
  "condition": "exactly how to check it each tick (command/API + what counts as 'needs me')",
  "priority": "medium",
  "armed_at": "2026-05-24T10:00:00Z",
  "rung": "monitoring",          // monitoring | warned | alerted | called | resolved
  "warned_at": null,             // ISO time the chat WARNING was posted
  "last_idle_seconds": 0,
  "notes": ""                    // anything to carry forward (run IDs, etc.)
}

rung meanings: monitoring = nothing fired yet; warned = warning posted, in the 1–2 min confirmation window; alerted = one-way alert sent; called = phone call placed; resolved = watch is fully done and the user has been informed — stop looping. Note: a call where the user hands over a NEW task does NOT go to resolved — it rewrites task/condition and goes back to monitoring (see "Resolving vs. pivoting after contact").

Read the full file on GitHub · 210 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. 3d ago First seen · 210 lines · 96 tokens per session scan A 034da1f18cce

Subscribe to this mod's changes

watchdog is a skill published in the GitHub repository mohitbadwal/ringback (21 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 96 tokens to every session and 4,165 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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