instro: Skill for Claude Code

.agents/skills/add-instrument-driver/SKILL.md

add-instrument-driver is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from nominal-io/instro. It costs 102 tokens per session (3,223 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A workflow for creating a software driver that controls a laboratory instrument from its programming manual or API reference. The reference may be a PDF, document, HTML file, or website.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to add drivers for power supplies, multimeters, electronic loads, data-acquisition devices, oscilloscopes, and other listed instrument types, then connect the driver to the repository.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of guessing device commands or ignoring the repository’s rules for drivers. It first gathers the exact model, instrument category, reference, issue, and branch needed for a tracked change.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions subagents; installed under .agents/ (shared by several agents).

This is nominal-io/instro's own configuration. It tells Claude Code and Codex how to work on instro itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything instro configures →

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to nominal-io/instro. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nominal-io/instro/main/.agents/skills/add-instrument-driver/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nominal-io/instro

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 add-instrument-driver

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nominal-io/instro/add-instrument-driver.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nominal-io/instro/add-instrument-driver)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nominal-io/instro/add-instrument-driver"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nominal-io/instro/add-instrument-driver.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 102 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,223 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00102 $0.03223
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.01612
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00645
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00322

Measured 2d ago against content hash 35efb0f9eeb6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

add-instrument-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.

.agents/skills/add-instrument-driver/SKILL.md · 237 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 237 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Add an instrument driver from a manual/API

This skill turns a vendor programming reference into a correct, tested, registered driver PR. It follows the repo's existing conventions exactly — read AGENTS.md ("How to add a vendor driver", "Patterns and constraints", "DAQ driver state tracking") before deviating. When in doubt, duplicate explicit code rather than abstract. This repo deliberately prefers duplication over shared mixins/factories.

Prerequisites — gather before writing code

  1. The programming reference. A path to a PDF/doc/HTML file, or a URL. If the user hasn't provided one, ask for it — do not guess SCPI commands or API code from model knowledge.
  2. Vendor and model (e.g. "Siglent SPD3303"). Confirm the exact model family the driver should cover; SCPI surfaces and APIs are often shared across a series.
  3. Category. One of psu, dmm, eload, daq, i2c, modbus, scope, awg, ethernetip. Infer from the instrument type; confirm with the user if ambiguous.
  4. Tracking issue + branch. Per AGENTS.md, no untracked work. Confirm an issue exists (or create one) and branch off main named after it (e.g. issue-142-siglent-spd-driver).
  5. Core vs. contrib. Default to core (instro/<category>/drivers/) if the user is a maintainer, otherwise use contrib (packages/instro-contrib/instro/contrib/<category>/drivers/). Some instruments only exist in unstable (packages/instro-unstable/). See CONTRIBUTING.md for the bar. Ask if unclear.

Step 1 — Extract a structured command spec from the manual

Manuals are large and noisy. Delegate parsing to the manual-spec-extractor subagent (.claude/agents/manual-spec-extractor.md) so the heavy document tokens stay out of this conversation. Give it:

  • the manual location (path or URL),
  • the target category and its required methods (read them from the category base class — see Step 3),
  • the vendor/model.

It returns a structured spec: per-method SCPI command(s), the error-query form and OK-prefix, the channel model, value formatting (decimal places, units), and which optional category methods the instrument supports. Review the spec against the manual yourself for anything safety- or wire-critical before coding.

Read the full file on GitHub · 237 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 Changed 35efb0f9eeb6
  2. 7d ago First seen · 237 lines · 102 tokens per session scan A 360fee8cec61

Subscribe to this mod's changes

add-instrument-driver is a skill published in the GitHub repository nominal-io/instro (669 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 102 tokens to every session and 3,223 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.

Related

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