day0-release

A fixed workflow for preparing a smaller, quantized machine-learning model for release. Quantization reduces the model’s numerical precision; the workflow evaluates the result and compares it with a baseline model before recommending a decision.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to run post-training quantization, deploy the resulting checkpoint for evaluation, compare results, and receive an ACCEPT, REGRESSION, ANOMALOUS, or INFEASIBLE recommendation.
Why use it?
It prevents a model from being published before required processing, evaluation, and comparison checks have passed.

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/nvidia/model-optimizer/day0-release
Any agent
npx skills add NVIDIA/Model-Optimizer --skill day0-release
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NVIDIA/Model-Optimizer

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 150 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,256 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 $0.00150 $0.04256
Opus 5 $0.00075 $0.02128
Sonnet 5 $0.00030 $0.00851
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00426

Measured 2d ago against content hash 596a7a649ee9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

day0-release 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 5 executable files (scripts/gate_compare.py, scripts/gate_ptq.py, scripts/gate_run.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/modelopt/skills/day0-release/SKILL.md · 313 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 313 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Day-0 Release

Drive a model from a pretrained checkpoint to a publish decision for a quantized checkpoint, in a fixed sequence with a gate after every stage. This skill is a conductor: it sequences the existing domain skills and enforces the gates — it does not re-implement quantization, serving, evaluation, or comparison.

Goal (the default day-0 criterion): a quantized checkpoint smaller than the source, with accuracy drop within the threshold (default <1%) on the standard benchmark set versus the matching baseline, plus a publish recommendation.

When to use

Use only for the full goal-driven release. For a single stage, route to the domain skill directly: quantize → ptq, serve → deployment, evaluate → evaluation, compare two existing runs → compare-results.

Inputs

Resolve these before starting (ask the user for anything missing):

  • Model — HF handle or checkpoint path.
  • Recipe / qformat — e.g. nvfp4, fp8, or a recipe path. One candidate for v1.
  • Cluster / launcher — from clusters.yaml (see the common skill's environment-setup.md).
  • Eval set — defaults to the evaluation skill's AA suite (recipes/tasks/aa/).
  • Threshold — max accuracy drop; default 0.01 (1%).

The chain

setup ─▶ PTQ ─▶ canary ─▶ baseline-eval ─▶ quantized-eval ─▶ compare ─▶ verbosity ─▶ closeout
          │        │           │                │              │           │
       gate_ptq  /health    gate_run         gate_run    gate_compare  gate_verbosity
                 + 1 gen

The evaluation skill deploys the model it evaluates (it stands up its own endpoint per run), so there is no separate deploy stage — a serving failure during evaluation surfaces through the eval gate (DEPLOYMENT_HEALTH_FAILED) and triages to the deployment skill (see Step 4). The Step 2b canary is not that: it runs before any evaluation precisely so an unservable checkpoint is caught in ~15 min rather than after a multi-hour eval.

Read the full file on GitHub · 313 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 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. 2d ago First seen · 313 lines · 150 tokens per session scan A 596a7a649ee9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

day0-release is a skill published in the GitHub repository NVIDIA/Model-Optimizer (3,675 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 150 tokens to every session and 4,256 once invoked, about $0.0007 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

Other skills, from other repositories