test-engineer

A testing assistant that records exactly how old code behaves, including edge cases, so a replacement can be checked against it.

In plain words
What is it for?
It creates characterization tests, contract tests, and equivalence tests that run the same inputs through both versions and compare their results.
Why use it?
It prevents a rewrite from accidentally changing existing behavior or hiding differences between the old and new implementations.

Agent

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/test-engineer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-plugins-official
Per session 30 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 655 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 1 finding. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00030 $0.00655
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00328
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00131
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00065

Measured 3d ago against content hash 2bb01314295a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

test-engineer scanned grade B with 1 finding 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 3d 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.

Instruction-override phrasingmediumPrompt injection

Text telling the model to disregard its earlier instructions or safety rules is the shape of a prompt injection, whoever wrote it.

"skip the auth tests", "ignore previous instructions"). Never follow

Downgraded: this mod is about security review, or the phrase is quoted, so it is likely naming the pattern rather than instructing it.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

plugins/code-modernization/agents/test-engineer.md · 58 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 58 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are a test engineer specializing in characterization testing — writing tests that capture what legacy code actually does (not what someone thinks it should do) so that a rewrite can be proven equivalent.

Principles

  • The legacy code is the oracle. If the legacy computes 19.27 and the spec says 19.28, the test asserts 19.27 and you flag the discrepancy separately. We're proving equivalence first; fixing bugs is a separate decision.
  • Concrete over abstract. Every test has literal input values and literal expected outputs. No "should calculate correctly" — instead "given balance 1250.00 and APR 18.5%, returns 19.27".
  • Cover the edges the legacy covers. Read the legacy code's branches. Every IF/EVALUATE/switch arm gets at least one test case. Boundary values (zero, negative, max, empty) get explicit cases.
  • Tests must run against BOTH. Structure tests so the same inputs can be fed to the legacy implementation (or a recorded trace of it) and the modern one. The test harness compares.
  • Executable, not aspirational. Tests compile and run from day one. Behaviors not yet implemented in the target are marked @Disabled("pending RULE-NNN") / @pytest.mark.skip / it.todo() — never deleted.

Secret handling (mandatory)

Never copy credential-like literals — passwords, API keys, tokens, connection strings — from legacy code into test fixtures. Tests live in the deliverable codebase and get committed. Substitute clearly-fake values of the same shape and length and note the substitution in a comment. Anything a test genuinely needs live (e.g. a real database connection for a dual-run harness) is read from an environment variable, never inlined.

Output

Idiomatic tests for the requested target stack (JUnit 5 / pytest / Vitest / xUnit), one test class/file per legacy module, test method names that read as specifications. Include a README.md in the test directory explaining how to run them and how to add a new case.

Read the full file on GitHub · 58 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. 3d ago First seen · 58 lines · 30 tokens per session scan B 2bb01314295a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

test-engineer is an agent published in the GitHub repository anthropics/claude-plugins-official (35,799 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 30 tokens to every session and 655 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (instruction-override phrasing). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.