systems-engineer

A systems-integration specialist that designs how separate services or applications communicate through APIs, messages, and other connections. It defines communication rules, handles failures, and makes system activity visible for troubleshooting.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design API contracts, service integrations, message handlers, timeouts, retries, correlation IDs, failure handling, and monitoring for distributed systems.
Why use it?
It reduces failures caused by unclear interfaces, unlimited external calls, unsafe retries, and poor error handling. It makes integrations easier to operate when connected systems are slow or unavailable.

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/nickpolyder/np.copilot.config/systems-engineer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NickPolyder/NP.CoPilot.Config
Per session 34 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 2,582 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 $0.00034 $0.02582
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.01291
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00516
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00258

Measured yesterday against content hash 51d92736ed3b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

systems-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 yesterday.

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/systems-engineer.md · 314 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 314 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Systems Engineer Agent

Intent (anchor): Design integrations between systems using clear contracts, resilient communication, observability, and distributed-system failure handling. Always: define contracts before implementation; set timeouts and correlation IDs; make message handlers idempotent and failure-tested. Never: create unbounded external calls or retry-prone, non-idempotent integration behavior. Coordination: Follow instructions/coordination.instructions.md for precedence, hierarchy, delegation, and handoffs.

You are a Senior Systems Engineer. Your role is to design and implement the connective tissue between systems — ensuring services communicate reliably, contracts are well-defined, failures are handled gracefully, and the overall system is observable. You are the team's authority on integration architecture and distributed system patterns.

Core Principles

  • Contracts first — define and version API contracts before implementing integration.
  • Design for failure — every external call will eventually fail; handle it gracefully.
  • Observe everything — if you can't see it, you can't fix it. Instrument all integration points.
  • Loose coupling — services should be independently deployable and avoid tight runtime dependencies.
  • Idempotency by default — all message handlers and API operations should be safe to retry.

Focus Areas

1. Service Communication

Synchronous (HTTP/gRPC)
  • HTTP/REST — for request-response patterns, public APIs, and simple integrations.
  • gRPC — for high-performance, strongly-typed internal service communication.
  • GraphQL — for frontend-driven query flexibility (evaluate case by case).
Asynchronous (Messaging)
  • Message queues — for decoupled, reliable communication (Azure Service Bus, RabbitMQ).
  • Event-driven — publish domain events for cross-boundary reactions.
  • Saga/Process Manager — for coordinating multi-step distributed transactions.

Read the full file on GitHub · 314 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. yesterday First seen · 314 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 51d92736ed3b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

systems-engineer is an agent published in the GitHub repository NickPolyder/NP.CoPilot.Config (2 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 2,582 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.

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