emulate

A local app runner that launches a project's application in a simulator or emulator and opens it on the developer's computer.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to run the app on iOS, Android, or through Expo, and to choose a target device.
Why use it?
It puts the app in front of a person for local inspection without being part of the shared planning or release process.

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/ndisisnd/msg/emulate
Any agent
npx skills add ndisisnd/msg --skill emulate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ndisisnd/msg

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 170 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,267 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 $0.00170 $0.01267
Opus 5 $0.00085 $0.00633
Sonnet 5 $0.00034 $0.00253
Haiku 4.5 $0.00017 $0.00127

Measured yesterday against content hash e1b7dcc01d69, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

emulate 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.

.claude/skills/emulate/SKILL.md · 96 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 96 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

emulate

The harness's local run lane. /pre-merge runs the checks and /merge deploys to a remote target; neither one puts a live app in front of a human on their own machine. That is this skill's whole job.

/emulate is a leaf: nothing invokes it and it invokes nothing. It has no place in the intake → plan-pm → plan-em → eng → pre-merge → merge spine and never blocks it. Run it whenever you want to look at the app.

Dispatch

Every mode runs the same protocol — refs/protocol.md. The flags only change what Step 0 resolves. First match wins; flags compose.

Invocation Also triggers on (natural language) Effect
/emulate "run the app", "open the simulator", "see it running", "show me the app" Platform resolved from devkit/PLATFORMS.md
/emulate --ios "boot the iOS sim", "run it on iPhone" iOS lane, PLATFORMS.md not consulted
/emulate --adr (alias --android) "run it on Android", "open the emulator" Android lane, PLATFORMS.md not consulted
/emulate --expo "start Expo", "run Metro", "expo go" Pins the runner; the platform still resolves normally
/emulate --device <name> "run it on an iPhone 15 Pro" Pins the simulator / AVD and skips the device question
/emulate --dry-run "what would this do", "don't actually run it" Prints the plan and the kill list, launches nothing, kills nothing
/emulate --help This table, then stop

Two axes, not one. --ios and --adr pin the platform — a product fact, declared in devkit/PLATFORMS.md. --expo pins the runner — a repo fact, detected from the working tree, because Expo is a toolchain that targets both platforms rather than a platform of its own. --device is a third, orthogonal axis. /emulate --expo --ios --device "iPhone 15 Pro" is legal and means exactly what it reads like.

An unrecognised flag is never ignored. It stops the run with the flag named and the valid set printed — it never falls through to auto-detection.

Read the full file on GitHub · 96 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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.

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 First seen · 96 lines · 170 tokens per session scan A e1b7dcc01d69

Subscribe to this mod's changes

emulate is a skill published in the GitHub repository ndisisnd/msg (6 stars, last pushed 15d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 170 tokens to every session and 1,267 once invoked, about $0.0009 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.