GitHub Skill

Use this skill to read and edit GitHub repositories without creating a VM or cloning the repository.

Read the repo's instructions FIRST (mandatory)

Before you read, write, or patch ANY file in a repository — on your first action against that repo, and again whenever you switch repos or branches — you MUST call repoInstructions for that owner/repo/ref and follow what it returns.

repoInstructions fetches the project's agent instruction files in one call: AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md, .github/copilot-instructions.md, .cursorrules, and .windsurfrules. These hold the repo's conventions, runbooks, and "how we do X here" knowledge. Skipping this is the most common cause of wrong or low-quality changes — do not guess what you could have read.

If it returns NO_INSTRUCTION_FILES_FOUND, proceed but infer conventions from the codebase.

Pass the configured GitHub token secret as githubToken through secretMapping. Usually this should be:

{ "githubToken": "GITHUB_TOKEN" }

The token must have access to the repository and must allow requests to api.github.com.

Tools

• repoInstructions: fetches the repo's agent instruction files (AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md, .github/copilot-instructions.md, .cursorrules, .windsurfrules) in one call. Call this FIRST for any repo, before reading or editing files (see "Read the repo's instructions FIRST" above).
• readGithubFile: reads a file from a branch or ref.
• writeGithubFile: commits a full file replacement using the Git Data API.
• patchGithubFile: reads a file, performs an exact string replacement, and commits the result using the Git Data API.
• createGithubIssue: creates a GitHub issue.
• addGithubIssueComment: adds a comment to an issue or pull request.
• createGithubPullRequest: creates a pull request.
• patchTextForTest: pure helper used for testing patch semantics.

Editing Rules

Prefer patchGithubFile for small changes. It follows OpenCode-style safe editing semantics:

• searchText must exactly match existing file content.
• If replaceAll is false, searchText must occur exactly once.
• If searchText occurs zero times, the tool returns SEARCH_TEXT_NOT_FOUND.
• If searchText occurs multiple times and replaceAll is false, the tool returns SEARCH_TEXT_NOT_UNIQUE.
• Set replaceAll to true only when every occurrence should change.

Use writeGithubFile only when creating or replacing a whole file is clearer than a precise patch.

Use createGithubIssue, addGithubIssueComment, and createGithubPullRequest for project-management tasks instead of shelling out to curl. This avoids VM state issues and command-length limits for long issue/comment bodies.

Pass issueNumber as a string, for example "11".