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.
npx agentmods add skills/roshunsunder/filesift/search-codebasenpx skills add roshunsunder/filesift --skill search-codebasegit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/roshunsunder/filesiftWhat 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 | $0.00074 | $0.01641 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00037 | $0.00821 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00015 | $0.00328 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00007 | $0.00164 |
Grade A, and why
search-codebase 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 3d 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 — 145 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Searching Codebases with FileSift
FileSift indexes codebases and enables natural language search via hybrid keyword (BM25) + semantic (FAISS embeddings) search, merged with Reciprocal Rank Fusion.
When to use this skill
Use FileSift when the target is a concept or behaviour, not a known identifier.
Reach for FileSift when:
- You're in the exploration phase of a task and need to orient yourself in an unfamiliar codebase
- The user asks a question that requires understanding what code does ("how is auth handled?", "where does billing happen?", "what validates user input?")
- You need to find an implementation but don't know what it's called — you'd have to guess grep patterns
- You're looking for the files most relevant to a concept that could be expressed many ways (
retry,backoff,exponential_sleep,with_retries…) - You've read one relevant file and want to find its collaborators by semantic proximity
Prefer grep / glob instead when:
- You already know the exact function name, class name, or string to search for
- You're tracing a known call chain or import path
- The search is purely structural (file extensions, directory layout, naming conventions)
- The codebase is small enough that a directory listing gives you the full picture
The rule of thumb: if you'd have to guess the right grep pattern, FileSift will outperform it. If you already know the exact token, grep is faster.
Step 0 — Verify FileSift is installed
Do this before anything else, every time this skill is invoked for the first time in a session.
filesift --version
If the command is found, proceed to Quick start.
If it isn't found, install it. FileSift requires Python 3.12+ and is published on PyPI. The right install command depends on how the user manages Python packages. Always ask the user before running any installation commands.
| Environment | Install command |
|---|---|
| pip (default) | pip install filesift |
| uv (tool) | uv tool install filesift |
| uv (project) | uv add filesift |
| pipx | pipx install filesift |
| poetry | poetry add filesift |
| pdm | pdm add filesift |
| conda / mamba | pip install filesift (inside the active conda env) |
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.
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.
- 3d ago First seen · 145 lines · 74 tokens per session scan A b791446e6b63
search-codebase is a skill published in the GitHub repository roshunsunder/filesift (6 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 74 tokens to every session and 1,641 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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