Exploring Signals scouts Agent Skill

How to explore and make sense of PostHog Signals scouts — the scheduled agents that scan a project and write reports into the Signals inbox.

Context cost
25k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
6 files · 139.9 kB3 scripts among them — read before you run
Licence
not declarednone named by its author
Last change
—no release on file
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

How to explore and make sense of PostHog Signals scouts — the scheduled agents that scan a project and write reports into the Signals inbox. Use when a user wants to understand what scouts they have, how each one is behaving, and whether the fleet is actually working. Covers surveying the fleet and its schedules, reading recent scout runs and drilling into a single run's reasoning, inspecting the durable scratchpad memory the fleet has built up, tracing a run to the reports it wrote or edited, reading the follow-up checks still measuring a report, and assessing a scout's health and…

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

analytics

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md45.3 kB · preview
--- name: exploring-scouts metadata: owner_team: signals ---
19# Exploring Signals scouts
20
21A **scout** is a scheduled agent that wakes on its own interval, looks at one PostHog project, decides what's genuinely worth surfacing, and either writes it into the Signals inbox as a **report** or closes out empty (a real, valid outcome).
22PostHog ships a fleet of canonical scouts — a cross-product generalist (signals-scout-general) plus per-surface specialists (error tracking, logs, AI observability, experiments, feature flags, session replay, web analytics, surveys, and more).
23A project may also have **custom scouts** beyond the canonical fleet — any signals-scout-* skill a team authored (e.g. -brand-mentions, -mcp-feedback) shows up here too, so don't assume a fixed roster: scout-config-list is the authoritative roster for a project.
24(One caveat: a just-authored scout has no config row until the coordinator's next tick auto-registers one — or until someone registers it via the write-side scout-config-create — so a brand-new scout may briefly be missing from the list.)
25
26This skill helps you **understand and explore what a project's scouts are doing and how they're performing** — entirely through read-only MCP tools.
27It is the observability counterpart to the authoring-scouts skill (which teaches writing and tuning) and to the inbox-exploration skill (which covers the inbox reports scouts feed into).
28(The scout tools were recently renamed from signals-scout-* to scout-*; if a scout-* name comes back unknown, the server may still expose it under the legacy signals-scout-* name — search the tool catalog and call whichever name it returns.)
29
30**A scout's output is inbox reports, written 1:1.** Scouts list emit_report / edit_report in their allowed_tools and **author or edit inbox reports directly**; a run's output shows up as **emitted_report_ids** (reports it authored) and **edited_report_ids** (reports it updated).
31The run rows also carry emitted_count / emitted_finding_ids — **legacy fields from the deprecated signal-emitting channel** (weak emit_signal findings a pipeline consolidated). On a report-channel scout they stay 0 / empty even on a productive run; a non-zero tally means the run came from a scout still on the legacy channel (an old custom scout, or a canonical scout not yet ported) — real output for that run, not noise. When unsure of a scout's channel, check its allowed_tools via skill-get.
32**Never read emitted_count: 0 as "did nothing"** — check the report columns and the run summary first.
33A scout whose config carries a structured_output_schema has a third output channel next to reports: schema-validated **measurement records**, recorded as $scout_structured_output events in the project (only _scalar_ top-level payload keys flatten to output_<key> properties — object and array fields live solely inside the full output property, so a missing output_<key> is not a missing value; subject names the judged entity) rather than as run-row columns.
34The events are the ground truth — metadata.derived.has_structured_output says the run had at least one batch **accepted**, which is a fast per-run screen but not delivery confirmation (a rare capture failure after acceptance leaves it true with fewer or no events behind it), so count the events when the number of records matters. See [references/scout-data-model.md](references/scout-data-model.md) for the event shape.
35Of the scouts PostHog ships, signals-scout-mcp-tool-calls is the one that records a series: every run that finds MCP traffic writes a per-category roll-up of MCP tool health and per-tool session-share rows, whether or not it files a report, so a healthy category is distinguishable from an unmeasured one.
36No records is not by itself a broken channel.
37A run on a project with no recent $mcp_tool_call events stops early and records nothing, and a dry-run scout (emit off) has nowhere to record to.
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md6,475 words
Files6
Licencenot declared
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈270
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
24,755
on trigger
The instruction body and 5 supporting files, read only when the skill fires.
12.5%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would not fit in the window together.
050k100k150k200k context window

25k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Heavy. Teams tend to install this one per project rather than globally, and load it only when the job comes up.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

6 files, 139.9 kB on disk. Mostly text — the instructions the model reads — with 3 scripts in it that your client would run only if the instructions tell it to.

  • SKILL.md45.3 kB
  • references/assessing-performance.md8.9 kB
  • references/scout-data-model.md45.9 kB
  • scripts/assess_health.py17.6 kB
  • scripts/fleet_survey.py8.1 kB
  • scripts/render_run_report.py14.1 kB
What is not in it

A skill installs nothing and depends on nothing: it is a folder your client reads. This one carries 3 scripts beside the text, so the bundle is 6 files you can review in full before installing.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Exploring Signals scouts · 25k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/exploring-signals-scouts/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/exploring-signals-scouts" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/exploring-signals-scouts ] || { mv .claude/skills/exploring-signals-scouts "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/exploring-signals-scouts" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/exploring-signals-scouts"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add posthog/exploring-signals-scouts

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/exploring-signals-scouts/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/exploring-signals-scouts/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/exploring-signals-scouts" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/exploring-signals-scouts ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/exploring-signals-scouts "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/exploring-signals-scouts" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/exploring-signals-scouts" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/exploring-signals-scouts/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where. It appears as exploring-scouts in Gemini CLI, Codex, Copilot and Grok (its own name); Claude Code lists it by the folder name, exploring-signals-scouts.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Versionnot versioned
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referenceposthog/exploring-signals-scouts

Versions

Its author publishes no version number, so there is nothing here to pin to: what you install is the folder as it stands today. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

Pinning

Nothing to pin to: this skill carries no version number of its own. What you install is what the folder holds on the day you install it.

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