engine-sanity

engine-sanity is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from austin-starks/Public-Portfolio-Challenge. It costs 94 tokens per session (705 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A mandatory pre-flight test for NexusTrade’s strategy-certification engine. It checks that walk-forward testing, which evaluates a strategy across separate time periods, runs correctly before strategy work begins.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it at the start of a strategy bakeoff or certification campaign to test end-to-end execution, time-window separation, fold-winner persistence, and reproducibility of backtest results.
Why use it?
It prevents results from being trusted when the engine is broken or when training, validation, and out-of-sample data overlap. A failed check stops the certification campaign.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it at the start of a strategy bakeoff or certification campaign to test end-to-end execution, time-window separation, fold-winner persistence, and reproducibility of backtest results.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/austin-starks/public-portfolio-challenge/engine-sanity
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 austin-starks/Public-Portfolio-Challenge --skill engine-sanity
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/austin-starks/Public-Portfolio-Challenge

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 engine-sanity

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/austin-starks/public-portfolio-challenge/engine-sanity/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/austin-starks/public-portfolio-challenge/engine-sanity)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/austin-starks/public-portfolio-challenge/engine-sanity"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/austin-starks/public-portfolio-challenge/engine-sanity/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 engine-sanity

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/austin-starks/public-portfolio-challenge/engine-sanity"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/austin-starks/public-portfolio-challenge/engine-sanity.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 94 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 705 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 pass 7 Sept 2026
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 $0.00094 $0.00705
Opus 5 $0.00047 $0.00352
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00141
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00071

Measured 11d ago against content hash 14936357e501, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

engine-sanity 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (install.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.

skills/engine-sanity/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.

Engine Sanity Checks (Stage S0)

MANDATORY; blocks everything. Four contract checks that prove the certification engine is trustworthy before any design work. Each has a STOP-and-report failure mode — a failure here means the engine itself is broken (bug-protocol), and no downstream number can be trusted. These S0 runs (and S1 baseline scoring) explicitly DO NOT COUNT toward the certification-body minimum — they are contract checks and benchmarks, not candidate certifications.

The four checks

  1. Walk-forward sweep smoke. create_portfolio a trivial book (e.g. SPY > SMA50). Run run_walk_forward_study with mode:"validation", fold_count:2, engine_kind:"sweep", one gene_intent × 3 values, certification:false. It must start and complete with per-fold OOS + aggregate. Proves: the certification engine actually runs end-to-end.

  2. Window fidelity (one fold). Backtest the materialized fold winner on its validation and OOS windows; the fold's validationStatistics / oosStatistics must match standalone backtests within rounding. Confirm disjointness: train∩validation, train∩OOS, validation∩OOS all empty, and OOS starts after validation ends. Proves: the walk-forward windowing isn't leaking.

  3. Persistence. get_walk_forward_study_results returns a real selectedChatPortfolioId for every completed fold. Proves: fold winners materialize as real objects you can inspect/deploy.

  4. Dead-name handling. Tiny 2022-window backtest on the full universe including a name not yet listed then (e.g. SNDK). Pass: the name is absent, or appears in a not-yet-listed reject list with no fabricated price/indicator values. Fail: the engine errors, or returns any non-null reading for a name that didn't trade. Proves: the engine doesn't fabricate data on not-yet-listed names.

On failure

Any failed S0 check → STOP, file the bug-protocol hand-off doc, and do not proceed to design work. A broken engine invalidates everything downstream; there is no point certifying strategies on it.

Read the full file on GitHub · 53 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 11d ago First seen · 53 lines · 94 tokens per session scan A 14936357e501

Subscribe to this mod's changes

engine-sanity is a skill published in the GitHub repository austin-starks/Public-Portfolio-Challenge (44 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 94 tokens to every session and 705 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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