OpenShell is a runtime for autonomous AI agents that executes them in sandboxed environments governed by declarative policies. It is used to restrict agents' access to files, credentials, data, and network resources, and the catalogue includes skills and workflows for operating and contributing to it.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to NVIDIA/OpenShell. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NVIDIA/OpenShell/main/.agents/skills/launch-openshell-gator/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NVIDIA/OpenShellWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nvidia/openshell/launch-openshell-gator)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nvidia/openshell/launch-openshell-gator"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nvidia/openshell/launch-openshell-gator/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nvidia/openshell/launch-openshell-gator"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nvidia/openshell/launch-openshell-gator.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Snyk pass
- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium
These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →
- medium Agent Snooping · line 36 Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00090 | $0.05640 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00036 | $0.02256 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00018 | $0.01128 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00564 |
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 6d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 438 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
--watchand let the in-sandbox supervisor own sleeping and relaunching bounded cycles. - Do not add passive
sleeploops 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.yamlfor experiments. UseCODEX_MODEL=...and, if needed, a temporary--fromDocker context or--codex-binoverride. - 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 it in gateway's Docker or Podman image store. |
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. |
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.
- 6d ago Changed · +16 lines fc9c19efd4e5
- 21d ago Changed · +5 lines e25ca7855e7d
- 25d ago Changed · +5 lines 74a4beae1e1e
- 29d ago Changed · +4 lines 422f76426db7
- 1mo ago Changed · +2 lines 742288303213
- 1mo ago Changed 435e359b963b
- 1mo ago Changed · -6 lines 965c10339dc4
- 1mo ago Changed 1313d7955e48
- 2mo ago Changed · +2 lines c800d3b49b5f
- 2mo ago First seen · 410 lines · 90 tokens per session scan A a49a82e171e6
launch-openshell-gator is a skill published in the GitHub repository NVIDIA/OpenShell (21,172 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 90 tokens to every session and 5,640 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.
launch-openshell-gator compared with skills from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| launch-openshell-gatorNVIDIA/OpenShell | Skill | 21k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 90 | Claude Code, Codex |
| imagegenopenai/codex | Skill | 133k | today | Apache-2.0 | A | 113 | Codex |
| playwright-climicrosoft/playwright | Skill | 99k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 19 | Claude Code |
| local-ai-agentsmicrosoft/ai-agents-for-beginners | Skill | 79k | 4d ago | MIT | A | 200 | Claude Code, Codex |
| systematic-debuggingobra/superpowers | Skill | 313k | 3d ago | MIT | A | 21 | Claude Code |
| next-cache-components-adoptionvercel/next.js | Skill | 143k | today | MIT | A | 95 | Claude Code |
| chat-pet-sprite-creationmicrosoft/vscode | Skill | 195k | today | MIT | A | 53 | Claude Code, Codex |