use-openhcs

A skill for operating OpenHCS, a local system for running microscopy image-processing workflows. It helps an agent inspect plate data, create and validate processing pipelines, run jobs, and control the OpenHCS viewer.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to discover OpenHCS capabilities, author or validate CellProfiler-related pipelines, compile and execute processing jobs, inspect results, or interact with the GUI.
Why use it?
It provides the required checks and workflow context before using OpenHCS, reducing the risk of sending incomplete or invalid pipeline definitions.

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/openhcsdev/openhcs/use-openhcs
Any agent
npx skills add OpenHCSDev/openhcs --skill use-openhcs
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/OpenHCSDev/openhcs

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 611 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 $0.00055 $0.00611
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00305
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00122
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00061

Measured 2d ago against content hash 0d6ee760ec69, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

use-openhcs 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.

packaging/codex/openhcs/skills/use-openhcs/SKILL.md · 17 lines

What it actually says

Use OpenHCS

  1. Call openhcs_health_check before relying on other tools. Report a bootstrap or stale-server failure instead of working around it.
  2. If you do not already know OpenHCS, call openhcs_get_authoring_context with kind="first_use". Retain its execution, step-pattern, variable_components/group_by, artifact, and CellProfiler mental model while completing the task.
  3. Treat Python pipeline source as one complete PipelineDocument: pipeline_config plus ordered pipeline_steps. Never send a steps-only fragment, mirror configuration through a second argument, or strip source bindings from the reviewed document. UI-visible and headless routes use these same declarations even though their process and state owners differ.
  4. Call openhcs_search_capabilities with task-relevant workflow, target, or text filters. Its current surface_profile, registry-owned workflow metadata, side effects, and security metadata—not a remembered tool list—decide whether to use a UI-visible or exposed headless route. Use openhcs_list_capabilities only when the complete selected surface is required.
  5. Search knowledge and examples before authoring. For CellProfiler or benchmark work, search the biological task plus OpenHCS Python and retrieve the returned Official30 section with max_chars=50000. CellProfiler image, object, measurement, relationship, and export semantics lower into the same OpenHCS declarations and runtime.
  6. Inspect real plate data and registered function declarations before authoring. If the microscope is unsupported, use typed pipeline-level SourceBindingsConfig declarations to filter files, extract metadata, name semantic sources, and project a virtual workspace; make each consuming FunctionStep select those aliases through its step-local source bindings. Never parse filenames inside processing functions. Reflect global or pipeline configuration with openhcs_describe_config_schema before setting non-obvious fields. Keep filesystem operations inside configured read and write roots.
  7. Validate and compile before execution. Do not infer that source code, UI state, or an earlier validation result implies a current compiled plan.
  8. Start read-only. Use capability-registry metadata as the authority for mutation and exposure; before mutation, execution, UI actions, viewer launch, network use, or external data exposure, show the target/change, obtain approval, and refresh revision or request tokens.
  9. Preserve the active ownership route. Discover the GUI bridge before UI tools and apply code/state changes with current tokens. Use headless tools only when their workflow group is exposed. Treat structured errors and recovery hints as authoritative; never bypass path policy, stale-process checks, compile requirements, or bridge authentication.
Files

What ships with it

1 file 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 · 17 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A 0d6ee760ec69

Subscribe to this mod's changes

use-openhcs is a skill published in the GitHub repository OpenHCSDev/openhcs (4 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 611 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-31.

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