arn-assessing

A codebase assessment workflow that compares a project with stored coding patterns and identifies improvements. A codebase is the complete collection of source files and related project code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Reviewing codebase quality, checking compliance with documented patterns, finding technical debt or improvement opportunities, and preparing work for implementation.
Why use it?
It turns a broad request for a technical health check into a structured review with prioritized improvement areas.

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/appsvortex/arness/arn-assessing
Any agent
npx skills add AppsVortex/arness --skill arn-assessing
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AppsVortex/arness

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 132 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 804 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 $0.00132 $0.00804
Opus 5 $0.00066 $0.00402
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00161
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00080

Measured yesterday against content hash 107af5bf9e7b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

arn-assessing 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 yesterday.

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.

plugins/arn-code/skills/arn-assessing/SKILL.md · 83 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 83 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Arness Assessing

Comprehensive technical assessment of the codebase against stored patterns, followed by prioritized improvement identification. This is a first-citizen entry point that wraps arn-code-assess with a pre-flight check and provides chaining context to arn-implementing.

This skill is a medium orchestration wrapper. It MUST NOT duplicate arn-code-assess logic. All assessment work is done by the invoked skill (which has its own 7 internal gates). Arness-assessing handles: prerequisite checks, pre-flight validation, invoking the assess skill, and offering the chain exit.

Step 0: Ensure Configuration

Read ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/arn-code-ensure-config/references/step-0-fast-path.md and follow its instructions. This guarantees a user profile exists and ## Arness is configured with Arness Code fields before proceeding.

After Step 0 completes, extract the following from ## Arness:

  • Code patterns — path to the directory containing stored pattern documentation

Workflow

Step 1: Pre-flight Check

Verify that pattern documentation exists at the configured Code patterns path:

  • <code-patterns-dir>/code-patterns.md
  • <code-patterns-dir>/testing-patterns.md
  • <code-patterns-dir>/architecture.md

If any are missing: inform the user: "Pattern documentation is incomplete. The assessment needs stored patterns to compare against. Run /arn-planning first — it will generate pattern docs on first use." Do not proceed.

If all exist: inform the user briefly: "Pattern documentation found. Starting assessment..."


Step 2: Invoke Assess

Show progress:

Assessing: PRE-FLIGHT -> ASSESSMENT (scope -> analyze -> prioritize -> spec -> plan -> execute -> ship -> update-patterns)
                         ^^^^^^^^^^

Invoke the assess skill:

Skill: arn-code:arn-code-assess

The assess skill has its own 7 internal decision gates (scope selection, improvement selection, spec review, execution mode, etc.) and manages its own complete pipeline internally. Wait for it to complete.

Read the full file on GitHub · 83 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. yesterday First seen · 83 lines · 132 tokens per session scan A 107af5bf9e7b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

arn-assessing is a skill published in the GitHub repository AppsVortex/arness (33 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 132 tokens to every session and 804 once invoked, about $0.0007 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.