engineering-quality

engineering-quality is a skill for Codex from ashermahonin/agentic-skills. It costs 76 tokens per session (466 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A code-review and refactoring guide focused on keeping production code understandable as it changes. It considers names, module responsibilities, dependencies, side effects, errors, and tests.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for implementation planning, code review, legacy-code cleanup, and focused refactoring where existing behavior must remain stable.
Why use it?
It helps identify maintenance problems that affect correctness or future changes without encouraging unnecessary rewrites or abstractions.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: agents/openai.yaml present.

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/ashermahonin/agentic-skills/engineering-quality
Any agent
npx skills add ashermahonin/agentic-skills --skill engineering-quality
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ashermahonin/agentic-skills

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 engineering-quality

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ashermahonin/agentic-skills/engineering-quality.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ashermahonin/agentic-skills/engineering-quality)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ashermahonin/agentic-skills/engineering-quality"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ashermahonin/agentic-skills/engineering-quality.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 76 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 466 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 5.1 $0.00076 $0.00466
Opus 5 $0.00038 $0.00233
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00093
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00047

Measured 5d ago against content hash ad665a88604d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

engineering-quality 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 5d 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.

agentic/skills/engineering-quality/SKILL.md · 53 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 53 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Engineering quality

Purpose

Keep code understandable under change. This skill supplies the maintainability contract; the implementation skill owns production edits and the test skill owns behavioral proof.

Change context

  • Read the request, affected code, tests, and local conventions.
  • Identify the behavior that must remain stable and the specific maintenance problem being solved.
  • Separate observed problems from stylistic preference.
  • Read references/engineering-quality.md for the decision criteria.

Change method

  1. Map the changed responsibilities, dependencies, side effects, and public contracts.
  2. Find the smallest structural issue that affects correctness, readability, testability, or future change cost.
  3. Prefer a local correction: clearer name, smaller responsibility, explicit dependency, simpler control flow, stronger boundary, or removal of proven duplication.
  4. Reject abstractions that only prepare for hypothetical reuse.
  5. Preserve behavior with the affected test suite. When behavior changes, require an acceptance criterion and regression test.
  6. Check errors, logs, and comments from the caller's point of view.
  7. Report any wider debt separately instead of expanding the patch.

Evidence

  • The maintenance problem and its concrete impact
  • The narrowest useful change or review finding
  • Behavior-preservation evidence
  • Any compatibility, migration, or rollback concern
  • Deferred debt that remains outside scope

Ready when

  • Names and structure express the domain without explanatory noise.
  • Responsibilities and dependencies are visible at the right boundary.
  • Side effects and failure behavior are explicit.
  • Tests describe behavior rather than mirror the implementation.
  • The patch contains no unrelated cleanup.
  • Performance claims are measured, not assumed.

Handoff

Pass the scoped recommendation to service-implementation, or report findings through pr-review. Include the exact tests that protect the behavior.

Read the full file on GitHub · 53 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files 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. 5d ago First seen · 53 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A ad665a88604d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

engineering-quality is a skill published in the GitHub repository ashermahonin/agentic-skills (10 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 466 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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