reality-first-engineering

reality-first-engineering is a skill for Codex from a1024053774/design-integrity-guardrails. It costs 46 tokens per session (903 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning skill that checks important facts, requirements, external behavior, and acceptance conditions before consequential implementation work. It separates observed facts from guesses and uses small experiments to resolve important unknowns.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for deciding whether an implementation direction is justified, testing high-impact unknowns, and producing a pass or incomplete decision gate.
Why use it?
It reduces rework and prevents designs from relying on assumptions that could cause data loss, security problems, or false completion claims.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: agents/openai.yaml present.

Good fit It is for deciding whether an implementation direction is justified, testing high-impact unknowns, and producing a pass or incomplete decision gate.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/a1024053774/design-integrity-guardrails/reality-first-engineering
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.

Any agent
npx skills add a1024053774/design-integrity-guardrails --skill reality-first-engineering
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/a1024053774/design-integrity-guardrails

Made for: Codex.

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 reality-first-engineering

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/a1024053774/design-integrity-guardrails/reality-first-engineering/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/a1024053774/design-integrity-guardrails/reality-first-engineering)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/a1024053774/design-integrity-guardrails/reality-first-engineering"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/a1024053774/design-integrity-guardrails/reality-first-engineering/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for reality-first-engineering

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/a1024053774/design-integrity-guardrails/reality-first-engineering"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/a1024053774/design-integrity-guardrails/reality-first-engineering.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 46 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 903 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 $0.00046 $0.00903
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00451
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00181
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00090

Measured 4d ago against content hash cf057d4cdc27, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

reality-first-engineering 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.

reality-first-engineering/SKILL.md · 84 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 84 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Reality-First Engineering

Use this before architecture or broad implementation when a wrong assumption would cause meaningful rework, data loss, security exposure, irreversible side effects, or a false acceptance result. It is a small decision gate, not a second project manager, code review, test suite, or reason to delay a cheap reversible probe.

Do not use it for a small change with known inputs, contracts, and environment, or for documentation/formatting-only work.

Gate protocol

  1. State the decision. Write the goal, non-goals, acceptance condition, and the exact decision that must be made before implementation.
  2. Separate facts from guesses. Label each relevant item observed, measured, inferred, or unknown. An implementation assumption is not evidence. For facts likely to change, record the source and verification date.
  3. Choose the smallest probe. For each material unknown that could change the direction, define one falsifiable experiment with real inputs, a pass condition, a failure condition, a stop condition, an owner, and an evidence location. Test the highest-impact unknowns first; stop once the decision is determined instead of building the whole system to discover it.
  4. Gate the direction. Return PASS only when the architecture or plan follows from the available evidence.
    • BLOCKED: a decisive input, authority, or probe is unavailable, or the evidence disproves the proposed direction; no safe direction can be chosen.
    • INCOMPLETE: evidence exists but is partial or ambiguous; narrow to verified work or report what remains, and never silently treat it as PASS. Do not cover the gap with a fallback, compatibility path, mock-only branch, or speculative abstraction.
  5. Keep the boundary testable. Put external effects behind the existing boundary that owns them and keep deterministic domain/state logic driven by supplied inputs. A mock may validate pure logic, but it cannot establish an external fact it replaces. Add a layer only when a concrete caller or boundary needs it.

Read the full file on GitHub · 84 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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 Changed · +7 lines · +4 tokens per session cf057d4cdc27
  2. 10d ago First seen · 77 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A 39080750db0f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

reality-first-engineering is a skill published in the GitHub repository a1024053774/design-integrity-guardrails (0 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 46 tokens to every session and 903 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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