doca-programming-guide

doca-programming-guide is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from NVIDIA/skills. It costs 246 tokens per session (3,547 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A general programming guide for building applications with NVIDIA DOCA, NVIDIA’s software toolkit for BlueField DPUs and ConnectX devices.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to modify samples, compile DOCA programs with pkg-config and Meson, or connect Rust, Go, or Python code through the public C interface.
Why use it?
It explains the common application lifecycle and build process, so developers can start from an existing sample instead of designing the structure from scratch.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

About the project

NVIDIA/skills is a catalogue of portable instruction sets that teach coding agents how to use NVIDIA software for robotics, simulation, CUDA, retrieval-augmented generation, and related workflows. Developers install these skills in agents such as Claude Code or Codex, while the catalogue mirrors skills maintained in separate NVIDIA product repositories.

NVIDIA/skills · 3,211 stars · on GitHub · docs.nvidia.com

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/skills/doca-programming-guide
Any agent
npx skills add NVIDIA/skills --skill doca-programming-guide
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NVIDIA/skills

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 doca-programming-guide

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nvidia/skills/doca-programming-guide.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nvidia/skills/doca-programming-guide)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nvidia/skills/doca-programming-guide"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nvidia/skills/doca-programming-guide.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 246 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,547 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 5.1 $0.00246 $0.03547
Opus 5 $0.00123 $0.01774
Sonnet 5 $0.00049 $0.00709
Haiku 4.5 $0.00025 $0.00355

Measured 2d ago against content hash a4d12cce6918, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

doca-programming-guide 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.

skills/doca-programming-guide/SKILL.md · 262 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 262 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

DOCA programming guide

Where to start: Read ## Audience to confirm the user is consuming DOCA, not contributing to it. Then jump to the H2 that matches the verb (## modify for first-app derivation, ## build for the canonical build pattern, ## test for the test loop, ## debug for the program-class debug ladder).

Example questions this skill answers well

These are the CLASSES of program-class questions the skill is built to answer, each with one worked example. Library-specific overlays (Flow / DMS / Caps / …) live in the matching library skill; this skill answers the library-agnostic shape.

  • "How do I write my first DOCA program for <any library>?" — worked example: "I want to write my first DOCA Flow application." Answered by the modify-a-shipped-sample workflow in TASKS.md ## modify plus the canonical build pattern in TASKS.md ## build.
  • "What's the right build line for any DOCA library?" — worked example: "How do I compile a program that calls doca_rdma_*?" Answered by the pkg-config doca-<library> pattern in TASKS.md ## build (C/C++ Track 1) and the FFI/bindings pattern in Track 2.
  • "What's the lifecycle every DOCA object follows?" — worked example: "What's the right order of doca_flow_pipe_* calls in my program?" Answered by the cfg-create / init / start / use / stop / destroy template in CAPABILITIES.md ## Capabilities and modes.
  • "DOCA_ERROR_* came back — what does it mean and what do I do?" — worked example: "My code got DOCA_ERROR_BAD_STATE." Answered by the cross-library doca_error_get_descr() rule in CAPABILITIES.md ## Error taxonomy
  • "My program built and started, but does nothing on the wire." — worked example: "My Flow program runs cleanly but no traffic is matched." Answered by the validate-before-commit rule in CAPABILITIES.md ## Safety policy and the layered program-class debug ladder in TASKS.md ## debug.
  • "What does <language> consumer of DOCA look like (FFI / bindings)?" — worked example: "How do I call DOCA Comch from Rust without writing C?" Answered by Track 2 of TASKS.md ## build (FFI against the public C ABI) and the language-neutral lifecycle in CAPABILITIES.md ## Capabilities and modes.
  • "How should I classify and build all the shipped DOCA samples and applications? What's the difference between a sample and an application?" — worked example: "I tried to build all DOCA apps and 20/159 failed — which ones are real regressions vs missing optional stacks?" Answered by the sample-vs-application model and the category / dependency / skip-vs-fail taxonomy in TASKS.md ## sample-and-app-categorization, which separates "the SDK is broken" from "the optional GPU / RMAX / MPI stack is not on this BlueField".

Read the full file on GitHub · 262 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 · 262 lines · 246 tokens per session scan A a4d12cce6918

Subscribe to this mod's changes

doca-programming-guide is a skill published in the GitHub repository NVIDIA/skills (3,211 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 246 tokens to every session and 3,547 once invoked, about $0.0012 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 2026-09-03.