vigiles: Skill for Claude Code

.claude/skills/dogfood-cli/SKILL.md

dogfood-cli is a skill for Claude Code from zernie/vigiles. It costs 80 tokens per session (1,883 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A development workflow for finding and fixing real bugs in the vigiles command-line tool and its codebase. It uses several focused investigations, source traces, regression tests, builds, and the full test suite.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to dogfood vigiles on itself or real add-ons, trace defects to source locations, add tests, fix the code, and verify the changes.
Why use it?
It turns suspected problems into verified fixes instead of leaving unconfirmed bug reports. Separate investigations help cover different parts of the tool without duplicating work.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/. Also seen: mentions Codex.

This is zernie/vigiles's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on vigiles itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything vigiles configures →

Part of the vigiles plugin — 26 skills, 4 hooks, 2 plugins shipped together

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to zernie/vigiles. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zernie/vigiles/main/.claude/skills/dogfood-cli/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/zernie/vigiles

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install vigiles, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 26 skills, 4 hooks, 2 plugins.

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 dogfood-cli

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zernie/vigiles/dogfood-cli/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/zernie/vigiles/dogfood-cli)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zernie/vigiles/dogfood-cli"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zernie/vigiles/dogfood-cli/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 dogfood-cli

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zernie/vigiles/dogfood-cli"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zernie/vigiles/dogfood-cli.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 80 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,883 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 warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Excessive Agency · line 97
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
  • medium MCP Rug Pull · line 132
    npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.
    Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
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 $0.00080 $0.01883
Opus 5 $0.00040 $0.00941
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00377
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00188

Measured 9d ago against content hash e4b79f860e1d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

dogfood-cli 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 9d 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.

.claude/skills/dogfood-cli/SKILL.md · 136 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 136 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Dogfood the vigiles CLI (expert find + fix fan-out)

The repeatable method for finding real bugs in vigiles by running the tool on itself and on real plugins, then FIXING them — not filing them. This is how the 2026-07 batch found and fixed 14 source-traced bugs.

When to use

  • "Dogfood the CLI", "find more bugs the source-traced way", "fan out agents to audit vigiles on itself", "hunt for false positives in audit/lint".
  • NOT for a single known bug (just fix it) and NOT for shipped consumer features (this is a contributor-only dev process; .claude/ is not published).

The loop

fan out (parallel experts) → synthesize + VERIFY each finding → fix directly
   → regression test → build → targeted test → commit per theme → FULL SUITE → push

1. Fan out over DISTINCT surfaces

Spawn several agents (Sonnet — cheap parallel reads/traces; no synthesis needed per agent), each owning ONE surface so they don't overlap. The surface map that has paid off:

  • compile / eject — round-trip correctness, frontmatter/data loss, integrity.
  • audit / lint false-positives — a real plugin must stay CLEAN (don't cry wolf); phantom paths; glob/quote tokens misread; comment-only matches.
  • init / scaffold edge cases — no package.json, config-driven harness, malformed frontmatter, --target, the scaffolded CI workflow, --test/--lint.
  • config parse-don't-validate.vigilesrc.json severities ("off"/0/1/2), string-or-array keys, unknown values.
  • CLI error UX — an unknown flag/harness must print a clean message + exit 2, never a raw Node stack trace.
  • cross-harness (CC + Codex) + browser/disk parityscanFiles must match scanPlugin byte-for-byte; a Codex-shaped repo must not be scanned as CC.

Tell each agent: SOURCE-TRACE every bug to file:line + a proposed fix. A finding without a trace is a lead, not a bug.

2. Synthesize + VERIFY yourself

Agents over-report. Before touching anything, reproduce each finding yourself (run the real built CLI on a tmp fixture or a vendored test/dogfood/* plugin). Discard what doesn't repro. Confirm the exact file:line.

Read the full file on GitHub · 136 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. 9d ago First seen · 136 lines · 80 tokens per session scan A e4b79f860e1d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

dogfood-cli is a skill published in the GitHub repository zernie/vigiles (15 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 80 tokens to every session and 1,883 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 2026-08-30.