prompt-engineer

prompt-engineer is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from aakashg/pm-claude-skills. It costs 55 tokens per session (2,048 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A prompt-improvement guide for finding why an instruction to an AI gives poor results and rewriting it. It also shows the original and revised versions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to diagnose, rewrite, optimize, shorten, or debug prompts, and to explain why each change was made.
Why use it?
It helps remove guesswork when an AI prompt is unclear, too long, or produces the wrong kind of answer.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions Claude Code.

Good fit Use it to diagnose, rewrite, optimize, shorten, or debug prompts, and to explain why each change was made.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/aakashg/pm-claude-skills/prompt-engineer
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 aakashg/pm-claude-skills --skill prompt-engineer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aakashg/pm-claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code, 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 prompt-engineer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aakashg/pm-claude-skills/prompt-engineer/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aakashg/pm-claude-skills/prompt-engineer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aakashg/pm-claude-skills/prompt-engineer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aakashg/pm-claude-skills/prompt-engineer/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 prompt-engineer

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aakashg/pm-claude-skills/prompt-engineer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aakashg/pm-claude-skills/prompt-engineer.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,048 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Output Handling · line 68
    Output size or generation rate is not bounded. Unbounded output enables denial-of-service through resource exhaustion, log flooding, or context-window stuffing.
    Fix: Set explicit limits on output length, generation count, and rate. Use max_tokens and truncation to prevent unbounded output.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00055 $0.02048
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.01024
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00410
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00205

Measured 11d ago against content hash 5d23903cffff, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

prompt-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 11d 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.

skills/prompt-engineer/SKILL.md · 190 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 190 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prompt Engineer

Diagnose a prompt, rewrite it, and show exactly what changed and why.

Step 0 — Read first

Source Path What to extract
The prompt whatever the user pasted Actual wording — never paraphrase before diagnosing
Failing output the output they got, if provided The failure mode; this determines the fix
Project context CLAUDE.md Audience, product, banned words, output preferences
Technique reference references/techniques.md Full before/after examples for each technique

If the user pasted a prompt but no failing output, ask for one example of what it produced. Diagnosing from the prompt alone guesses at the failure mode.

Constraints

Mandatory.

  • Always show before and after. The user must see the diff, not just the result.
  • Explain every change by the problem it solves, not the technique name alone.
  • Preserve the user's intent. Improve how they ask, never what they are asking for.
  • Right-size the fix. A 10-line prompt that works beats a 50-line prompt that confuses.
  • Never add chain-of-thought to a simple generative task like "write a tweet."
  • Never write "be thorough and comprehensive." Name exactly what to cover.
  • Never add a role that does not match the task.
  • Never add a few-shot example below the quality bar you expect back. Bad examples teach bad patterns.
  • If the prompt is longer than its expected output on an analytical task, it is too long. Cut it.

Existence check

Before rewriting, verify:

  1. The prompt itself — the literal text, not a description of it.
  2. The goal — what the user wants the output to do or be used for.
  3. The failure — what the current output gets wrong, ideally with a sample.

If two of three are missing, do not rewrite. Ask for exactly those. Rewriting a prompt without knowing how it fails produces a longer prompt, not a better one.

Step 1 — Diagnose

Score the prompt across these dimensions. Name which ones fail.

Read the full file on GitHub · 190 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. 11d ago First seen · 190 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A 5d23903cffff

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prompt-engineer is a skill published in the GitHub repository aakashg/pm-claude-skills (106 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 2,048 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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