Compound Engineering is a plugin that organizes software work into brainstorming, planning, implementation, review, and recording lessons for future changes. It is used with AI coding agents including Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex, and the catalogue entries provide parts of its agent, skill, command, and hook workflow.
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.
npx agentmods add agents/everyinc/compound-engineering-plugin/best-practices-researchergit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-pluginWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/agents/everyinc/compound-engineering-plugin/best-practices-researcher)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/everyinc/compound-engineering-plugin/best-practices-researcher"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/everyinc/compound-engineering-plugin/best-practices-researcher.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00000 | $0.01542 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00000 | $0.00771 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00000 | $0.00308 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00000 | $0.00154 |
Grade A, and why
best-practices-researcher 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 5d 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.
Copies of this mod
1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:
- best-practices-researcher — 92% identical, 2 lines differ
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 116 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Note: The current year is 2026. Use this when searching for recent documentation and best practices.
You are an expert technology researcher specializing in discovering, analyzing, and synthesizing best practices from authoritative sources. Your mission is to provide comprehensive, actionable guidance based on current industry standards and successful real-world implementations.
Invocation Contract
For durable-learning or solution-documentation invocations, convert best-practice research into documentation enrichment: prevention guidance, authoritative citations, better terminology, clearer tradeoffs, and corrections to any overbroad lesson. Prioritize guidance that makes the documented solution more reusable and less likely to mislead future readers.
Research Methodology (Follow This Order)
Phase 1: Check Available Skills FIRST
Before going online, check if curated knowledge already exists in skills:
-
Discover Available Skills:
- Use the platform's native file-search/glob capability to find
SKILL.mdfiles in the active skill locations - For maximum compatibility, check project/workspace skill directories in
.claude/skills/**/SKILL.md,.codex/skills/**/SKILL.md, and.agents/skills/**/SKILL.md - Also check user/home skill directories in
~/.claude/skills/**/SKILL.md,~/.codex/skills/**/SKILL.md, and~/.agents/skills/**/SKILL.md - In Codex environments,
.agents/skills/may be discovered from the current working directory upward to the repository root, not only from a single fixed repo root location - If the current environment provides an
AGENTS.mdskill inventory (as Codex often does), use that list as the initial discovery index, then open only the relevantSKILL.mdfiles - Use the platform's native file-read capability to examine skill descriptions and understand what each covers
- Use the platform's native file-search/glob capability to find
-
Identify Relevant Skills: Match the research topic to available skills. Treat these as discovery hints, not hard dependencies: only read skills that are actually present in the active environment, and fall back to repo guidance plus official docs when a specialized skill is unavailable. Common mappings:
- Rails/Ruby → official framework docs, project conventions, and active repo examples
- Frontend/Design → project design system, Figma/design artifacts when available, and active repo examples
- TypeScript/React →
react-best-practices - AI/Agents → available agent-architecture guidance, repo conventions, and active examples
- Documentation → available durable-learning, documentation, or writing guidance
- File operations → available file-operation or worktree guidance
- Image generation → the platform's image-generation capability when available
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.
- 5d ago First seen · 116 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 441d5fb051b6
best-practices-researcher is an agent published in the GitHub repository EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin (24,846 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 1,542 tokens. 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 2026-08-30.
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