A skill for using SIFS, a tool that searches code by behavior, intent, symbols, and indexed file chunks. It provides commands for searching, finding related code, outlining files, and packaging relevant context.

Use it to trace architecture, locate implementations and call sites, inspect symbols, find similar code, or gather focused context from a local checkout or Git source.

It helps an agent investigate a codebase efficiently before opening many files or running broad text searches. It is intended for understanding existing code, not general internet research.

sifs-search — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by tristanmanchester

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.

Any agent

npx skills add tristanmanchester/sifs --skill sifs-search

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tristanmanchester/sifs

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tristanmanchester/sifs/sifs-search/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tristanmanchester/sifs/sifs-search)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tristanmanchester/sifs/sifs-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tristanmanchester/sifs/sifs-search/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tristanmanchester/sifs/sifs-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tristanmanchester/sifs/sifs-search.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 94 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 584 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00094	$0.00584
Opus 5.5	$0.00038	$0.00234
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00019	$0.00117
Haiku 4.5	$0.00009	$0.00058

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 61ec982d87af, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

sifs-search 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 2mo 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.

extras/agent-skills/sifs-search/SKILL.md · 47 lines

What it actually says

Use SIFS from the shell when you need codebase context. The CLI is the reliable path; MCP tools are optional and should only be used when they are visible in the current agent session.

When to Use

Use for local code search, symbol discovery, behavior tracing, related-code lookup, and indexed file/chunk inspection.
Use before reading many files by hand when the task starts with "where is...", "how is...", "find the implementation...", or "what code handles...".
Do not use for general web research, package documentation lookup, or non-code document search unless the user explicitly points SIFS at a source tree.

Start by discovering the local contract:

sifs agent-context --json

Search by intent, behavior, symbol, or exact text:

sifs search "authentication flow" --source <project>
sifs search "save_pretrained" --source <project> --mode bm25
sifs search "save model to disk" --source <project> --limit 10

Inspect indexed files and chunks before reading broad files:

sifs list-files --source <project> --limit 200 --json
sifs list-files --source <project> --prefix src/auth/ --json
sifs symbol SessionToken --source <project> --json
sifs outline src/auth.rs --source <project> --symbols-limit 200 --chunks-limit 100 --json
sifs get src/auth.rs 42 --source <project>
sifs find-related src/auth.rs 42 --source <project>

Use --source <project> when the agent may not be running from the target checkout. Use --filter-path <repo-relative-path> for path narrowing and --limit for bounded results.

If MCP tools named search, symbol, outline, pack, get_chunk, or list_files are visible, they may be used for the same workflow. If they are missing, configured-but-invisible, or failing, fall back to the CLI immediately.

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.

2mo ago First seen · 47 lines · 94 tokens per session scan A 61ec982d87af

Subscribe to this mod's changes

sifs-search is a skill published in the GitHub repository tristanmanchester/sifs (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 94 tokens to every session and 584 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 2026-08-31.

Debugging

sifs-search next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
sifs-searchtristanmanchester/sifs	Skill	2	1mo ago	MIT	A	94	Claude Code, Codex
systematic-debuggingopen-metadata/OpenMetadata	Skill	16k	today	Apache-2.0	A	37	Claude Code
log-error-digestzebbern/claude-code-guide	Skill	4.7k	2d ago	MIT	A	71	Claude Code, Codex
incident-response-incident-responsermyndharis/antigravity-skills	Skill	2.0k	yesterday	MIT	A	36	Claude Code, Codex
cwv-optimizeradobe/skills	Skill	321	today	Apache-2.0	A	112	Claude Code
ci-fixersipyourdrink-ltd/bernstein	Skill	1.2k	today	Apache-2.0	A	15	Claude Code, Codex
diagnosing-missing-recordingsPostHog/posthog	Skill	41k	today	none	A	76	Claude Code, Codex