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/release-captain/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/release-captain)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nvidia/openshell/release-captain"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nvidia/openshell/release-captain/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/release-captain"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nvidia/openshell/release-captain.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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 | $0.00086 | $0.02861 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00034 | $0.01144 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00017 | $0.00572 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00286 |
Grade A, and why
release-captain 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 234 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Release Captain
OpenShell publishes a stable release every Tuesday from a qualified pre-release (RFC 0014). The release captain keeps the week's pre-release train green, coordinates the last merges, cuts the release, and starts the next train.
How to use this skill
| When | Ask | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| The week before your turn | "I'm release captain next week. Is the train ready?" | Checks that the next version's -pre.1 exists. If not, ask this week's captain to start the train (Tuesday step 6). Then check each weekday that Auto-Tag's pre-release ran and passed (gh run list --workflow release-prerelease.yml --limit 3), and fix failures as they happen (Monday step 3) instead of on Monday. |
| Monday | "Run the release captain Monday checklist." | Monday steps 1–4. |
| A pre-release failed | "vX.Y.Z-pre.N failed, help me fix it." |
Monday step 3 and Recovery. |
| Tuesday | "Cut the release." | Tuesday steps 1–6, ending with starting the next train. |
Guardrails
Get explicit approval, with the exact command and target SHA, before pushing a
tag, dispatching, rerunning, or cancelling a workflow, merging or approving a
PR, or posting in Slack or GitHub. Never repoint a stable tag, delete a -pre.N
tag, or start a second Pre-release run for a tag; it has no concurrency guard.
How the train works
- A train has one base version, such as
v0.1.4, fixed by its-pre.1tag. A patch train can't take breaking changes to Stable interfaces. Release Auto-Tagruns on weekdays at 14:00 Europe/Zurich. Ifmainhas commits since the latest-pre.N, it tags the next one and dispatchesPre-release(release-prerelease.yml, about 45 minutes). It skips when the train has no-pre.1or the base version is already stable.Pre-releasebuilds, then publishes and qualifies in parallel, and writes arelease-notespreview artifact. Pushing a-pre.Ntag by hand starts it.Release(release.yml) is dispatched by hand with the stable version. It picks the highest-pre.Nonmainwhose wholePre-releaserun passed, creates the stable tag on that commit, and publishes without requalifying.- Stable releases publish public schemas to
buf.build/openshell/corewith the release tag as the label; prereleases skip Buf publication. The Buf repository must exist and Actions must have aBUF_TOKENsecret with write access. A failed Buf push fails the release run; follow Recovery before rerunning the failed publication job.
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.
- 2d ago Changed · +5 lines 407ce905d826
- 3d ago Changed · -15 lines 6ef2e88a6230
- 9d ago Changed · +15 lines 67b89b531113
- 16d ago First seen · 229 lines · 86 tokens per session scan A d9674b917c27
release-captain is a skill published in the GitHub repository NVIDIA/OpenShell (21,172 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 2,861 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-10-22.
release-captain compared with skills from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| release-captainNVIDIA/OpenShell | Skill | 21k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 86 | Claude Code, Codex |
| release-announcementpaperclipai/paperclip | Skill | 111k | today | MIT | A | 42 | Claude Code, Codex |
| releasethedotmack/claude-mem | Skill | 114k | today | Apache-2.0 | A | 13 | Claude Code |
| release-notesphuryn/pm-skills | Skill | 28k | 8d ago | MIT | A | 57 | Claude Code |
| multi-agent-release-managerchromium/chromium | Skill | 25k | today | BSD-3-Clause | A | 27 | Claude Code, Codex |
| pack-submitaeonfun/aeon | Skill | 788 | yesterday | MIT | A | 27 | Claude Code, Codex |
| updater_guidesiddsachar/row-bot | Skill | 1.7k | today | Apache-2.0 | A | 22 | Claude Code, Codex |