ipsw-skill

An AI agent skill for Apple firmware and binary reverse engineering using the ipsw CLI tool.

Supports Claude Code, Codex CLI, Antigravity, Gemini CLI, and Pi (pi-coding-agent).

What This Skill Provides

This skill empowers AI agents to assist with:

• Remote-first firmware triage - inspect IPSWs/OTAs and pull single components without downloading the whole image
• Firmware components - kernelcaches, dyld_shared_cache, exclave/SEP/SPTM/coprocessor firmware, IMG4, AEA, OTA payloads
• Userspace reverse engineering - DSC symbol lookup, disassembly, xrefs, imports, soft links
• ObjC/Swift headers - dump private framework interfaces and diff them between releases
• Kernel & KEXT analysis - symbolication, C++ classes, syscalls/MIG, KEXT extraction
• Sandbox and entitlements - decompile profiles, capability queries, entitlement search
• Release diffing and crash symbolication - patch hunting between builds, panics and crash logs

Installation

Prerequisites

Install the ipsw CLI tool:

brew install blacktop/tap/ipsw

Pick one install method per agent. Installing both a plugin and a standalone copy loads the skill twice (ipsw and ipsw:ipsw).

skills.sh

npx skills add https://github.com/blacktop/ipsw-skill --skill ipsw

Claude Code

Install from the marketplace:

claude plugin marketplace add blacktop/ipsw-skill
claude plugin install ipsw@ipsw-skill

Or install manually:

git clone https://github.com/blacktop/ipsw-skill /tmp/ipsw-skill

# User-wide (available in all projects)
mv /tmp/ipsw-skill/ipsw ~/.claude/skills/ipsw

# Project-specific (check into your repo)
mv /tmp/ipsw-skill/ipsw .claude/skills/ipsw

Codex CLI

Install from the marketplace:

codex plugin marketplace add blacktop/ipsw-skill
codex plugin add ipsw@ipsw-skill

Or use the built-in skill installer:

$skill-installer https://github.com/blacktop/ipsw-skill --path ipsw

Or install manually:

git clone https://github.com/blacktop/ipsw-skill /tmp/ipsw-skill

# User-wide
mv /tmp/ipsw-skill/ipsw ~/.codex/skills/ipsw

# Project-specific
mv /tmp/ipsw-skill/ipsw .codex/skills/ipsw

Antigravity

Install the skill manually:

git clone https://github.com/blacktop/ipsw-skill /tmp/ipsw-skill

# Workspace-specific
mv /tmp/ipsw-skill/ipsw <workspace-root>/.agents/skills/ipsw

# User-wide (all workspaces)
mv /tmp/ipsw-skill/ipsw ~/.gemini/config/skills/ipsw

Run /skills in Antigravity CLI (agy) to confirm it loaded. Older Antigravity releases read .agent/skills/ instead of .agents/skills/. On first launch, agy also imports skills already installed for Gemini CLI.

Gemini CLI

Google stopped serving Gemini CLI for individual accounts on June 18, 2026; enterprise and paid API-key users can install the skill natively:

gemini skills install https://github.com/blacktop/ipsw-skill --path ipsw

Pi (pi-coding-agent)

# Global (adds package to ~/.pi/agent/settings.json; clones to ~/.pi/agent/git/...)
pi install https://github.com/blacktop/ipsw-skill

# Project-local (adds package to ./.pi/settings.json; clones to ./.pi/git/...)
pi install -l https://github.com/blacktop/ipsw-skill

Updating