magpie-optimize-skill

A refactoring workflow for existing coding-agent skills, which are instruction packages that guide an agent's work. It restructures their files and wording while checking that their behavior stays the same.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to split a large skill into linked documents, replace project-specific details with placeholders, and apply approved cleanup passes to one skill or a group of skills.
Why use it?
It makes oversized or repetitive skill instructions easier to maintain without changing what they do.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/apache/magpie/optimize-skill
Any agent
npx skills add apache/magpie --skill optimize-skill
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/apache/magpie

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 155 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,187 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 $0.00155 $0.03187
Opus 5 $0.00077 $0.01594
Sonnet 5 $0.00031 $0.00637
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00319

Measured 2d ago against content hash f0c3b92da986, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

magpie-optimize-skill 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 2d 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/optimize-skill/SKILL.md · 303 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 303 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

optimize-skill

Take one existing framework skill — or a maintainer-supplied set of them — and make it leaner without changing what it does. The skill diagnoses a target against the optimization catalogue distilled from the recent security-suite refactors, proposes the applicable passes, and applies them one at a time as behavior-preserving edits the maintainer confirms. The skill validator (and, for tracker-touching skills, the placeholder linter) is the deterministic gate: it is green before the first pass and green again after the last.

This skill operates only on framework-internal filesSKILL.md bodies, their sibling docs, <project-config> manifests, tool adapters in this repo. It reads no external or attacker-controlled content, so the prompt-injection-defence callout does not apply.

It is the refactoring counterpart to write-skill: write-skill authors a net-new skill; optimize-skill restructures one that already exists. The five passes, their smells, exemplar PRs, mechanics, and behavior-preservation guarantees live in patterns.md; this body is the orchestration.


Adopter overrides

Before running the default behaviour documented below, this skill consults .apache-magpie-local/optimize-skill.md (personal, gitignored) and .apache-magpie-overrides/optimize-skill.md (committed, project-wide) in the adopter repo if it exists, and applies any agent-readable overrides it finds. See docs/setup/agentic-overrides.md for the contract — what overrides may contain, hard rules, the reconciliation flow on framework upgrade, upstreaming guidance.

Read the full file on GitHub · 303 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. 2d ago First seen · 303 lines · 155 tokens per session scan A f0c3b92da986

Subscribe to this mod's changes

magpie-optimize-skill is a skill published in the GitHub repository apache/magpie (84 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 155 tokens to every session and 3,187 once invoked, about $0.0008 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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