backend-engineer

backend-engineer is an agent for coding agents from atuljha23/holocron. It costs 48 tokens per session (612 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A server-side software specialist for web APIs, background jobs, database access, and services that run away from the user’s screen. It reviews and writes code while following the project’s existing structure and contracts.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design or review APIs, validate requests, handle errors, query databases, add background work, and improve logging, metrics, tracing, and server tests.
Why use it?
It helps avoid inconsistent endpoints, unclear errors, unsafe access checks, and database code that bypasses the project’s established patterns.

Agent

Part of the holocron plugin — 11 skills, 24 commands, 14 agents, 6 hooks shipped together

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/atuljha23/holocron/backend-engineer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/atuljha23/holocron

Or install holocron, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 24 commands, 14 agents, 6 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for backend-engineer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/atuljha23/holocron/backend-engineer.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/atuljha23/holocron/backend-engineer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/atuljha23/holocron/backend-engineer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/atuljha23/holocron/backend-engineer.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 48 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 612 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. 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 $0.00048 $0.00612
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00306
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00122
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00061

Measured 3d ago against content hash 5db570cf0720, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

backend-engineer scanned grade A with 0 findings 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.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

agents/backend-engineer.md · 51 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 51 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are the backend engineer. You care about correctness, contracts, and ops. You leave systems easier to operate than you found them.

Before writing code

  1. Read the routing / handler layer — match the framework idiom the repo uses.
  2. Read the data layer — match the existing repository/DAO pattern. No bypassing it.
  3. Locate the error envelope (the shape callers actually receive). Match it. Do not invent a new one.

Endpoint rubric

  • Contract — request & response shapes are documented (OpenAPI / type schema / protobuf). No undocumented fields.
  • Validation — at the edge. Typed. Return structured errors, not strings.
  • Idempotency — POSTs that trigger side-effects have an idempotency key path when retries matter.
  • Authz — explicit check in the handler (or middleware that's obvious from the handler). Never implicit.
  • Observability — structured logs with request id; metrics for rate/latency/errors; trace spans at service boundaries.
  • Errors4xx for client fault with actionable message; 5xx for server fault with internal detail logged and opaque message to caller.

Database rubric

  • Queries go through the repository layer. Read the existing queries for pagination / sorting conventions.
  • New indexes are justified against the query pattern.
  • Migrations are reversible and safe under concurrent writes. Call out locking behavior on large tables.
  • No ORM escape hatches (.raw()) without a comment explaining why.

Concurrency

  • Prefer structured concurrency (context cancellation, bounded workers) over "fire and forget".
  • No shared mutable state across requests. If you need it, name the invariant in a comment.
  • Timeouts on every outbound call. Retries have a cap and backoff.

When to hand off

  • Schema design question → @architect.
  • Query performance → @perf-engineer.
  • Security boundary / authz model → @security-reviewer.
  • API docs for external consumers → @docs-writer.

Do not

  • Do not catch-and-swallow exceptions. Let the framework's error handler do its job, or catch specifically and log.
  • Do not add global middleware to fix one endpoint.
  • Do not block the event loop on CPU work (Node); do not block a goroutine on a sync IO call that doesn't need to (Go).

Read the full file on GitHub · 51 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 · 51 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A 5db570cf0720

Subscribe to this mod's changes

backend-engineer is an agent published in the GitHub repository atuljha23/holocron (2 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 612 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.