engineering-historian

engineering-historian is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from AdityaVasireddy/agent-skills. It costs 187 tokens per session (4,780 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A system for recording engineering decisions and turning repeated lessons into documented rules. It stores cases, judgments, principles, and standards in plain Markdown files.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to capture decisions automatically after sessions, retrieve past engineering knowledge, and review or promote notes with commands such as /case, /history, and /distill.
Why use it?
Important reasoning is often lost after a coding session. This workflow preserves the evidence behind decisions and lets you review drafts before promoting them into lasting guidance.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it to capture decisions automatically after sessions, retrieve past engineering knowledge, and review or promote notes with commands such as /case, /history, and /distill.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/adityavasireddy/agent-skills/engineering-historian
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 AdityaVasireddy/agent-skills --skill engineering-historian
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AdityaVasireddy/agent-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 engineering-historian

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/adityavasireddy/agent-skills/engineering-historian/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/adityavasireddy/agent-skills/engineering-historian)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/adityavasireddy/agent-skills/engineering-historian"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/adityavasireddy/agent-skills/engineering-historian/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 engineering-historian

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/adityavasireddy/agent-skills/engineering-historian"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/adityavasireddy/agent-skills/engineering-historian.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 187 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,780 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 $0.00187 $0.04780
Opus 5 $0.00093 $0.02390
Sonnet 5 $0.00037 $0.00956
Haiku 4.5 $0.00019 $0.00478

Measured 12d ago against content hash 841c46f0ad8d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

engineering-historian 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 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (scripts/historian-sweep.sh, tests/run-tests.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

engineering-historian/SKILL.md · 179 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 179 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Engineering Historian (v3.1)

Storage is stupid; retrieval is smart — meaning the storage layer stays deliberately dumb (plain markdown, minimal taxonomy) so that intelligence is applied at read and distillation time, not speculated into folder structures. And wisdom is earned through cited evidence, not asserted. This system captures specific decisions as CASES, distills their reasoning into JUDGMENTS, promotes recurring patterns into PRINCIPLES, and hardens checkable principles into STANDARDS. Nothing enters as a rule without a cited case behind it. A principle without provenance is invalid in this system: delete it on sight.

What v3 changes from v2.5: nothing in the pipeline, formats, promotion rules, retrieval, or vault layout. v3 only changes when capture fires. In v2.5 a human had to remember to type /history or /case; that is where the system died in practice. v3 replaces the human trigger with an automatic post-session sweep that drafts cases (status: auto) from the transcript, reviewed in one batch at /distill. Manual /case and /history still work as overrides. Everything below the "Automation layer" heading is the only new material; everything above it is v2.5 verbatim.

What v3.1 changes from v3: nothing in what is captured or how — only the sweep's pre-filter. v3.0 skipped sessions with few user turns, which silently dropped prompt-light agentic sessions (three prompts, hours of autonomous work). v3.1 replaces that significance guess with a triviality gate: skip only when every available deterministic signal — transcript size, user turns, git activity — proves the session trivial; otherwise sweep. When uncertain, capture: a false run costs one cheap NOTHING call, a false skip loses history. Rationale and rejected alternatives: docs/adr/ADR-001-capture-gate-triviality.md; release notes: CHANGELOG.md.

Three modes: capture (Tier 1, now sweep-driven), distillation (Tier 2, periodic), retrieval.

The pipeline

Read the full file on GitHub · 179 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. 12d ago First seen · 179 lines · 187 tokens per session scan A 841c46f0ad8d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

engineering-historian is a skill published in the GitHub repository AdityaVasireddy/agent-skills (2 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 187 tokens to every session and 4,780 once invoked, about $0.0009 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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