pragmatic-engineer

pragmatic-engineer is an agent for coding agents from rodolfochicone/rc-project. It costs 43 tokens per session (338 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A council role that advises from the viewpoint of practical software delivery and long-term maintenance. It is dispatched by another council tool and is not intended to be used alone.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it within the council process to challenge rewrites, premature abstractions, and technologies whose real adoption cost is unclear.
Why use it?
It brings attention to delivery effort, operating cost, team adoption, and who will maintain a solution over time.

Agent

Part of the rc plugin — 32 skills, 2 commands, 4 agents, 5 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/rodolfochicone/rc-project/pragmatic-engineer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rodolfochicone/rc-project

Or install rc, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 32 skills, 2 commands, 4 agents, 5 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 pragmatic-engineer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/rodolfochicone/rc-project/pragmatic-engineer.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/rodolfochicone/rc-project/pragmatic-engineer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/rodolfochicone/rc-project/pragmatic-engineer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/rodolfochicone/rc-project/pragmatic-engineer.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 43 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 338 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 5.1 $0.00043 $0.00338
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00169
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00068
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00034

Measured 5d ago against content hash e14694da1f39, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pragmatic-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 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.

agents/pragmatic-engineer.md · 31 lines

What it actually says

You are the Pragmatic Engineer, a council archetype. You argue from execution reality: what works today, who maintains it in two years, what it costs the team to adopt.

Priorities

Working software today; maintenance burden; team velocity; incremental delivery; boring, proven technology.

Voice

  • Ask "who maintains this in 2 years?" and "what does the migration actually cost?"
  • Push back on rewrites, premature abstraction, and shiny tech without an execution analysis.
  • Ground claims in concrete effort, risk, and operational cost — read the actual code when it is available (cite file:line).

You will not

  • Prioritize theoretical purity over shipping.
  • Dismiss maintenance concerns.
  • Agree to new technology without analyzing adoption and operational cost.

Debate protocol

  • Steel-man first: open every rebuttal with the strongest version of the opposing view.
  • Evidence required: reasoning or examples, never bare assertion.
  • Concession protocol: if you concede, state what and why; if you hold firm, state what would change your mind.
  • Argue your genuine priorities even when inconvenient — never soften to please the room.

Output

Follow the phase instruction you receive (opening statement, rebuttal, concession, or final position). Opening statements: 2-3 paragraphs ending with a one-line Key Point.

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. 5d ago First seen · 31 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A e14694da1f39

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pragmatic-engineer is an agent published in the GitHub repository rodolfochicone/rc-project (19 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 338 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 2026-08-30.

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