anti-patterns

anti-patterns is a skill for Claude Code from avelikiy/great_cto. It costs 59 tokens per session (1,429 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A reference catalogue of software-development lifecycle anti-patterns, which are recurring approaches that tend to cause problems in architecture, planning, implementation, or incident reviews.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when reviewing system architecture, project plans, code, or post-incident reports to spot issues such as oversized services, tightly coupled systems, or premature optimisation.
Why use it?
Teams may recognise that a proposal feels wrong without having clear names or explanations for the risks. The catalogue gives reviewers a shared way to identify and reject these patterns.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the great-cto plugin — 40 skills, 44 commands, 70 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it when reviewing system architecture, project plans, code, or post-incident reports to spot issues such as oversized services, tightly coupled systems, or premature optimisation.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/avelikiy/great_cto/anti-patterns
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 avelikiy/great_cto --skill anti-patterns
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/avelikiy/great_cto

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install great-cto, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 40 skills, 44 commands, 70 agents.

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 anti-patterns

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/avelikiy/great_cto/anti-patterns/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/avelikiy/great_cto/anti-patterns)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/avelikiy/great_cto/anti-patterns"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/avelikiy/great_cto/anti-patterns/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 anti-patterns

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/avelikiy/great_cto/anti-patterns"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/avelikiy/great_cto/anti-patterns.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 59 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,429 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 $0.00059 $0.01429
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00714
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00286
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00143

Measured 7d ago against content hash d7275ecfbe00, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

anti-patterns 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 7d 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/anti-patterns/SKILL.md · 142 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 142 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

SDLC anti-patterns to reject

Reference catalogue. Cite the anti-pattern by name when blocking a proposal — gives the user a clear vocabulary to discuss the issue.

Architecture anti-patterns

A-1. God service

Smell: One service does auth, billing, search, file storage, and email. Why bad: Single deploy unit, single point of failure, every team touches it, change velocity drops over time. Fix: Split by business capability (DDD bounded context).

A-2. Distributed monolith

Smell: 12 microservices but they share a database and deploy together. Why bad: All cost of distributed (latency, eventual consistency, ops overhead) with none of the benefits (independent deploy, isolation). Fix: Either truly separate (own DB, own deploy pipeline) or merge.

A-3. Synchronous chains

Smell: Request → Service A → Service B → Service C → Service D. Why bad: Compound failure probability, p99 latency adds up. Fix: Async with events, or co-locate hot path.

A-4. Premature optimization

Smell: Custom Redis Lua scripts, hand-tuned binary protocols, before the first paying user. Why bad: Complexity cost paid up front, never recouped. Fix: Start simple. Optimize when you have load data.

A-5. Resume-driven development

Smell: "Let's use Kubernetes / GraphQL / event sourcing / DDD" with no current pain it solves. Why bad: Optimizes for engineer's resume, not user's outcome. Fix: Ask "what's the simplest thing that could work?"

Plan / process anti-patterns

P-1. Big-bang rewrite

Smell: "Let's rewrite this in ." Why bad: 80% of rewrites fail. The old system has years of bug fixes baked in. Fix: Strangler-fig. New behaviour in new code, old code coexists, delete when traffic moves.

P-2. Hero culture

Smell: "Senior X always fixes the 3am incidents." Why bad: Bus factor 1. X burns out. Knowledge doesn't transfer. Fix: Runbooks, post-mortems, rotating on-call, pair-debugging.

Read the full file on GitHub · 142 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. 7d ago First seen · 142 lines · 59 tokens per session scan A d7275ecfbe00

Subscribe to this mod's changes

anti-patterns is a skill published in the GitHub repository avelikiy/great_cto (92 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 59 tokens to every session and 1,429 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-09-03.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

audit

Project health audit and health check — architecture, performance, tests, dependencies, code quality. Use when assessing overall project health, before releases, or after refactors.

oliver-kriska/claude-elixir-phoenix · 35 tokens

review-all

Multi-agent code review for diffs (project-agnostic). Covers standards, bugs, security, DRY, smells, perf, tests, API contracts, a11y/i18n. Verifies each finding to eliminate false positives. Use for /review-all, pre-PR/pre-commit review, or auditing uncommitted/staged changes.

ncoevoet/claude-review-all · 74 tokens

rubber-ducky

Use when you've planned a non-trivial change and are about to implement it, finished a complex or multi-file piece of work, just wrote tests, or are stuck on repeated failures — and any time the user says "rubber duck this", "rubber ducky", "get a second opinion", "sanity-check my plan", "poke holes in this", "what am…

harnessprotocol/harness-kit · 186 tokens

mobile-flows-maestro

This skill should be used when Maestro is explicitly requested or already present and the task is to author, run, or debug iOS/Android Maestro flows; use Maestro MCP; or handle Maestro selectors, system UI, permissions, Keychain, JavaScript, waits, device state, flakiness, or CI. Evidence includes a .maestro directory…

johnkozaris/jko-claude-plugins · 102 tokens

fec-debug-framework

A step-by-step method for finding the cause of front-end build failures, browser errors, broken screens, failed requests, or incorrect data. It separates build, runtime, visual, and API problems and uses evidence to test possible causes.

bovinphang/frontend-craft · 66 tokens

fec-legacy-to-modern-migration

A guide for moving older front-end code—such as JavaScript, jQuery, HTML/CSS, server-rendered pages, or old frameworks—to newer tools while keeping the same behavior. It covers gradual migrations as well as modernising parts of a multi-page site.

bovinphang/frontend-craft · 97 tokens