agent-substrate-overview

agent-substrate-overview is a skill for Claude Code from vinnie357/claude-skills. It costs 87 tokens per session (2,058 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A reference guide to Agent Substrate, an early-stage Kubernetes runtime for running many stateful agent workloads on fewer worker pods. It explains how it compares with the Kubernetes agent-sandbox project.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when comparing sandbox runtimes, reviewing the WorkerPool and ActorTemplate model, or deciding which Kubernetes-based approach to investigate.
Why use it?
It helps you judge whether Agent Substrate fits your scale and efficiency needs without treating its changing alpha APIs as a ready-made operating guide.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions Claude Code.

Part of the agent-sandboxing plugin — 7 skills, 6 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it when comparing sandbox runtimes, reviewing the WorkerPool and ActorTemplate model, or deciding which Kubernetes-based approach to investigate.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/agent-substrate-overview
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 vinnie357/claude-skills --skill agent-substrate-overview
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vinnie357/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install agent-sandboxing, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills, 6 commands.

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 agent-substrate-overview

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/agent-substrate-overview/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/agent-substrate-overview)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/agent-substrate-overview"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/agent-substrate-overview/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for agent-substrate-overview

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/agent-substrate-overview"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/agent-substrate-overview.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 87 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,058 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00087 $0.02058
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.01029
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00412
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00206

Measured 6d ago against content hash f5f63fdfeb6d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

agent-substrate-overview 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 6d 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.

plugins/tools/agent-sandboxing/skills/agent-substrate-overview/SKILL.md · 144 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 144 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

agent-substrate-overview

Agent Substrate is an Apache-2.0 Kubernetes runtime for agent-like workloads that multiplexes many stateful actors onto fewer worker pods, preserving in-memory + disk state via gVisor checkpoint/restore. It is explicitly alpha (v0.0.0, README quote: "VERY early development… APIs are almost guaranteed to change"). This skill is a short reference so you can evaluate it against k8s-agent-sandbox, not an operational guide.

If the operational decision is already "use Substrate," read the upstream README directly — this skill is intentionally not a step-by-step install guide because Substrate is at v0.0.0 with API churn between commits, so pinning a recipe here would go stale.

What Substrate is

From the upstream README: "Agent substrate is a system built on top of Kubernetes which manages agent-like workloads to achieve higher scale and efficiency than Kubernetes alone can offer, with lower latency."

Architectural diff vs kubernetes-sigs/agent-sandbox:

agent-sandbox (kubernetes-sigs) agent-substrate
Maturity v0.4.6 (released) v0.0.0 (alpha)
Control plane k8s controller + CRDs only k8s controller + dedicated gRPC ateapi
Workload model One sandbox per claim Many actors multiplexed onto fewer pods
Suspend/resume Pod snapshots (GKE feature) gVisor runsc checkpoint/restore first-class
CLI kubectl + Python SDK kubectl-ate plugin
Use case per-session ephemeral agents high-density actor swarms

Per Google's 2026-05-20 blog: "Substrate is the open-source ultra-scale tier sharing Sandbox's core secure runtime and snapshotting capabilities with a minimal control plane designed to bypass some of the limitations of Kubernetes for millions of sub-second tool calls."

Components

  • ateapi — gRPC control plane.
  • atelet — node-level DaemonSet supervising workers and snapshots.
  • atecontroller — k8s controller reconciling Substrate CRDs.
  • atenet — networking controller: DNS, Envoy routing, proxy sidecars.
  • ateom-gvisor — interior helper running runsc checkpoint/restore.
  • podcertcontroller — Pod Certificate signer polyfill.
  • kubectl-ate — operator CLI plugin.

Read the full file on GitHub · 144 lines

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. 6d ago First seen · 144 lines · 87 tokens per session scan A f5f63fdfeb6d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

agent-substrate-overview is a skill published in the GitHub repository vinnie357/claude-skills (25 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 87 tokens to every session and 2,058 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 2026-09-03.

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