Volt Load Testing

What it does

When your agent uses it

• Reviewing an API and the user asks to load test
• Measure latency
• Check behavior under concurrency
• Investigate performance regressions

Example prompts

• “/volt-load-testing”

Requirements

• A credential in API_TOKEN

Workflow steps

8 steps, taken from the first numbered list in SKILL.md.

1. 1Verify that volt is on PATH and inspect volt bench -h.
2. 2Verify one functional request with the service's tests or curl. Volt does not
3. 3Run a five-request smoke test with one connection and -rate 1.
4. 4Inspect the JSON result before increasing traffic.
5. 5Run an unrecorded warm-up.
6. 6Run a representative, explicitly rate-limited baseline.
7. 7Increase load only when the user requested it and the prior stage remained
8. 8Save JSON evidence and report the workload with secrets redacted.

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 35e1ad9. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

• Tool permissions

  Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

  From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

• Runs code

  No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md (its code samples are bash).

  From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

• Network

  No URLs in SKILL.md.

  From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

• Credentials

  Names these keys or tokens, usually read from environment variables:

  • API_TOKEN

  From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Volt Load Testing loads about 1.2k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 103 tokens; SKILL.md has 555 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it

~103

When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches

~1.2k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from owenHochwald/volt at commit 35e1ad9, republished under its MPL-2.0 licence (© owenHochwald). 555 words, ~1,193 tokens.

name

volt-load-testing

description

Safely exercise and evaluate HTTP APIs with the Volt CLI, including authenticated requests, JSON bodies, staged load, machine-readable results, performance baselines, and before/after comparisons. Use when developing or reviewing an API and the user asks to load test, benchmark, measure latency or throughput, check behavior under concurrency, investigate performance regressions, or run Volt.

volt bench \
  -url http://127.0.0.1:8080/api/widgets \
  -m POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${API_TOKEN}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -b "$(<request.json)" \
  -c 1 \
  -n 5 \
  -rate 1 \
  -json \
  -o volt-smoke.json

volt bench \
  -url http://127.0.0.1:8080/api/widgets \
  -m GET \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${API_TOKEN}" \
  -c 10 \
  -d 30s \
  -rate 100 \
  -t 5s \
  -json \
  -o volt-baseline.json

© owenHochwald, MPL-2.0. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

SKILL.md and 1 other file in skills/volt-load-testing of owenHochwald/volt.

• SKILL.md
• agents/openai.yaml

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 35e1ad9