launch-openshell-gator

A guide for starting and supervising OpenShell gator agents, which are headless coding agents running in isolated environments. It covers launching them, checking their status and logs, and handling startup problems.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when launching gator on issues or pull requests, checking sandboxes, building its environment, restarting stuck runs, or inspecting logs.
Why use it?
It defines the operator process for keeping gator runs supervised and for diagnosing unhealthy sandboxes or gateways.

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/openshell/launch-openshell-gator
Any agent
npx skills add NVIDIA/OpenShell --skill launch-openshell-gator
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NVIDIA/OpenShell

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 90 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,934 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 $0.00090 $0.04934
Opus 5 $0.00045 $0.02467
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00987
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00493

Measured yesterday against content hash a49a82e171e6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

launch-openshell-gator 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.

.agents/skills/launch-openshell-gator/SKILL.md · 410 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 410 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Launch OpenShell Gator

Launch and supervise the repository's headless gator sandbox agent through OpenShell. This skill covers the operator workflow around scripts/agents/run.sh; the in-sandbox review and state-machine policy remains the gator-gate skill baked into the gator payload.

For gator's PR/issue validation policy, load gator-gate inside the launched sandbox. For generic sandbox CLI usage, use openshell-cli. For unhealthy gateways or sandbox startup failures, use debug-openshell-cluster after the launch preflight identifies a gateway/runtime problem.

Non-Negotiable Rules

  • Keep normal gator launches supervised: use --watch --background and let the in-sandbox supervisor own sleeping and relaunching bounded cycles.
  • Do not add passive sleep loops in the operator session to watch gator. Check logs or status once, then report the current state or launch a proper watcher outside the model session only when explicitly asked.
  • Do not change the default gator model in scripts/agents/gator/agent.yaml for experiments. Use CODEX_MODEL=... and, if needed, a temporary --from Docker context or --codex-bin override.
  • Do not push to contributor branches, approve, merge, post /ok to test, or broaden gator scope unless the operator explicitly authorized that action.
  • Scope each launch prompt to the requested issue/PR set. Avoid repo-wide gator scans unless the operator asked for repo-wide processing.
  • Leave unrelated local files alone, including .opencode/ artifacts and old gator logs unless the user asks for cleanup.

Key Paths

Path Purpose
scripts/agents/run.sh Manifest-driven OpenShell agent launcher.
scripts/agents/gator/agent.yaml Gator manifest: immutable payload version, default gateway, harness, providers, runtime, skills, and subagents.
scripts/agents/gator/Dockerfile Gator sandbox image source. Local launches build this image through OpenShell.
scripts/agents/gator/policy.yaml Sandbox policy for the gator agent.
scripts/agents/gator/bin/gh Gator-specific gh wrapper and same-SHA duplicate-post guard.
scripts/agents/gator/bin/review-feedback-ledger Builds tree-aware review scope, durable findings, convergence telemetry, and review-budget state.
scripts/agents/gator/bin/resolve-gator-review-threads Resolves addressed Gator-owned inline review threads by ledger finding ID.
scripts/agents/gator/bin/validate-review-findings Enforces the blocker evidence schema and downgrades unsupported hypotheses.
scripts/agents/gator/prompts/gator.md Rendered top-level prompt template baked into the payload.
scripts/agents/gator/skills/gator-gate/SKILL.md In-sandbox gator state-machine skill.
scripts/agents/gator/logs/ Background launch and supervisor logs.

Read the full file on GitHub · 410 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. yesterday First seen · 410 lines · 90 tokens per session scan A a49a82e171e6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

launch-openshell-gator is a skill published in the GitHub repository NVIDIA/OpenShell (8,421 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 90 tokens to every session and 4,934 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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