anneal

A timed workflow for finding and fixing code problems commonly introduced by AI, such as duplicated logic, unnecessary complexity, hidden errors, and inconsistent conventions.

In plain words
What is it for?
It coordinates subagents that inspect and improve a codebase during a specified duration, while tracking progress.
Why use it?
It prevents cleanup work from stopping early or being judged complete without using the full time the user assigned.

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/av/harbor/anneal
Any agent
npx skills add av/harbor --skill anneal
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/av/harbor

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 49 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,417 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 $0.00049 $0.03417
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.01708
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00683
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00342

Measured yesterday against content hash e00230717069, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

anneal 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.

.agents/skills/anneal/SKILL.md · 283 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 283 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Anneal

Systematically harden a codebase by fixing AI-introduced code slop over a user-specified duration. The clock decides when work stops, not you.

Your Role

You are the orchestrator. You do exactly two things:

  1. Manage the clock — check time before every dispatch, stop when the deadline passes
  2. Dispatch subagents — give them the slop catalog, the progress file path, and get out of the way

You do NOT do any actual work. No code changes, no file edits, no exploration, no analysis, no "quick fixes." All productive work happens inside subagents. Your context is reserved exclusively for the dispatch loop. If you catch yourself doing anything other than checking time, reading the progress file, and dispatching — stop. That work belongs in a subagent.

The Iron Law

YOU DO NOT DECIDE WHEN THE WORK IS DONE. THE CLOCK DECIDES.

Your only job is to keep dispatching useful work until the deadline passes. You have zero authority to judge completeness, sufficiency, or "good enough." The user gave you a duration. You use all of it.

Inputs

The user provides two things:

  1. Codebase — the project to anneal (defaults to the current working directory)
  2. Duration — how long to run (e.g., "4 hours", "overnight", "90 minutes")

If the duration is vague ("overnight"), interpret it as 8 hours. If truly ambiguous, ask once.

The Slop Catalog

These are the patterns AI agents actually introduce into codebases. Every subagent receives this catalog as its detection guide. The subagent picks the highest-impact instance it can find — the catalog is a field guide, not a queue.

1. Duplication Instead of Reuse

Reimplements logic that already exists elsewhere in the codebase. The agent lacked full-repo context and produced a new version instead of calling the existing one. Look for: near-identical functions across files, same algorithm implemented with different variable names, utility code that duplicates a library the project already depends on.

Read the full file on GitHub · 283 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. yesterday First seen · 283 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A e00230717069

Subscribe to this mod's changes

anneal is a skill published in the GitHub repository av/harbor (3,198 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 3,417 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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