v-archaeology

v-archaeology is a command for coding agents from procoders/superpowers-v. It costs 37 tokens per session (325 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A command that runs only the code-archaeology stage of Compound V, an engineering workflow for examining an existing codebase before changing it.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it on a topic or feature spec to produce an archaeology report with design constraints and a map of files that may need changes.
Why use it?
It gives you a technical audit without running the workflow’s domain or library checks, helping reveal constraints and affected files early.

Command

Part of the superpowers-v plugin — 3 skills, 17 commands, 6 agents, 3 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 commands/procoders/superpowers-v/v-archaeology
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/procoders/superpowers-v

Or install superpowers-v, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills, 17 commands, 6 agents, 3 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 v-archaeology

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/procoders/superpowers-v/v-archaeology.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/commands/procoders/superpowers-v/v-archaeology)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/procoders/superpowers-v/v-archaeology"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/procoders/superpowers-v/v-archaeology.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 37 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 325 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 $0.00037 $0.00325
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00162
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00065
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00032

Measured 4d ago against content hash 694d3a08564a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

v-archaeology 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 4d 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.

commands/v-archaeology.md · 22 lines

What it actually says

You are about to run Phase 1A only of Compound V: a code-archaeology audit on {{args}}.

This skips Phase 1B (domain-expert) and Phase 1C (library-validator). Use the full Compound V flow (just stop using a slash command — the skill auto-fires after brainstorming) if you want all three.

Steps

  1. Read the brainstorming spec (or use the topic argument as the spec context).
  2. Dispatch the compound-v:code-archaeologist agent with:
    • Topic / spec from {{args}} or the most recent brainstorming output
    • Repo root = current working directory
    • Knowledge base path = docs/superpowers/archaeology/_knowledge-base/
    • Model: opus (set by the agent definition)
    • maxTurns: 15
  3. When the agent returns, the audit is saved to docs/superpowers/archaeology/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic-slug>.md.
  4. Surface the "Design constraints for the spec" section and the "File Touch Map" to the user — these are what the next phase (writing-plans) consumes.

If {{args}} is empty, ask: "What feature or topic should I run archaeology on?" then proceed.

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. 4d ago First seen · 22 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A 694d3a08564a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

v-archaeology is a command published in the GitHub repository procoders/superpowers-v (35 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 325 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.