modernize-assess

A command for examining one legacy system or a group of systems and describing their size, structure, complexity, and technical debt. Legacy systems are older applications that businesses still rely on.

In plain words
What is it for?
It inventories systems, maps their relative scale and complexity, and produces a heat map for planning a multi-system modernization program.
Why use it?
It turns a poorly understood collection of old code into evidence for deciding what to modernize first.

Command

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 commands/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/modernize-assess
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-plugins-official
Per session 18 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 2,781 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 $0.00018 $0.02781
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.01391
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00556
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00278

Measured yesterday against content hash 28bdeb5de2c9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

modernize-assess 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

plugins/code-modernization/commands/modernize-assess.md · 233 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 233 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Mode select. If $ARGUMENTS starts with --portfolio, run Portfolio mode against the directory that follows. Otherwise run Single-system mode against the system dir. Parse flags positionally-independently: --show-secrets may appear before or after the system dir — the system dir is the first non-flag token.


Portfolio mode (--portfolio <parent-dir>)

Sweep every immediate subdirectory of the parent dir and produce a heat-map a steering committee can use to sequence a multi-year program.

Preferred — Workflow orchestration. If the Workflow tool is available in this session (this command invocation is your authorization), enumerate the immediate subdirectories first — the workflow script has no filesystem access — then launch one survey agent per system, all independent:

ls -d <parent-dir>/*/ | xargs -n1 basename   # bare subdir names, not paths
Workflow({
  scriptPath: "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/workflows/portfolio-assess.js",
  args: { parentDir: "<parent-dir>", systems: ["<sub1>", "<sub2>", ...] }
})

This is one agent per system (a 30-system estate = 30 agents — tell the user the count before launching; the runtime queues them against its concurrency cap). Each agent returns a structured metrics row and the workflow computes COCOMO-II uniformly in code, so every row uses the identical formula. On return, render rows (plus an "unmeasured" marker row for anything in unmeasured) into the Step P4 heat-map, add the sequencing recommendation yourself, and skip Steps P1–P3. For very long sweeps, note the workflow's runId — if the session dies mid-sweep, relaunch with resumeFromRunId and completed systems return instantly from cache.

Fallback (no Workflow tool): run Steps P1–P3 per system yourself, then P4.

Step P1 — Per-system metrics

For each subdirectory <sys>:

cloc --quiet --csv <parent>/<sys>          # LOC by language
lizard -s cyclomatic_complexity <parent>/<sys> 2>/dev/null | tail -1

Read the full file on GitHub · 233 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 · 233 lines · 18 tokens per session scan A 28bdeb5de2c9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

modernize-assess is a command published in the GitHub repository anthropics/claude-plugins-official (35,577 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 18 tokens to every session and 2,781 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.