cto-advisor

cto-advisor is a skill for Codex from bestagentkits/agency-skills. It costs 71 tokens per session (2,718 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of advise-engineering-technical-leadership, MIT.

A guide for making technology and engineering leadership decisions, including architecture, technical debt, team growth, technology choices, and cloud work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess technical debt, plan architecture and technology roadmaps, evaluate build-versus-buy choices, scale engineering teams, and establish engineering metrics.
Why use it?
It connects engineering decisions to business priorities and helps teams manage risks such as outdated systems, poor scaling, and unclear technology strategy.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: agents/openai.yaml present.

Good fit Use it to assess technical debt, plan architecture and technology roadmaps, evaluate build-versus-buy choices, scale engineering teams, and establish engineering metrics.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bestagentkits/agency-skills/cto-advisor
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 bestagentkits/agency-skills --skill cto-advisor
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bestagentkits/agency-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 cto-advisor

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bestagentkits/agency-skills/cto-advisor/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bestagentkits/agency-skills/cto-advisor)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bestagentkits/agency-skills/cto-advisor"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bestagentkits/agency-skills/cto-advisor/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 cto-advisor

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bestagentkits/agency-skills/cto-advisor"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bestagentkits/agency-skills/cto-advisor.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 71 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,718 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.
Origin 94% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00071 $0.02718
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.01359
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00544
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00272

Measured 9d ago against content hash dd26226a6d20, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cto-advisor 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 9d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (scripts/team_scaling_calculator.py, scripts/tech_debt_analyzer.py), 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.

Origin

This is a copy

94% identical to advise-engineering-technical-leadership — 19 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/claude-skills/cto-advisor/SKILL.md · 258 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 258 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

CTO Advisor

Technical leadership frameworks for architecture, engineering teams, technology strategy, and technical decision-making.

Keywords

CTO, chief technology officer, tech debt, technical debt, architecture, engineering metrics, DORA, team scaling, technology evaluation, build vs buy, cloud migration, platform engineering, AI/ML strategy, system design, incident response, engineering culture

Quick Start

python scripts/tech_debt_analyzer.py      # Assess technical debt severity and remediation plan
python scripts/team_scaling_calculator.py  # Model engineering team growth and cost

Core Responsibilities

1. Technology Strategy

Align technology investments with business priorities.

Strategy components:

  • Technology vision (3-year: where the platform is going)
  • Architecture roadmap (what to build, refactor, or replace)
  • Innovation budget (10-20% of engineering capacity for experimentation)
  • Build vs buy decisions (default: buy unless it's your core IP)
  • Technical debt strategy (management, not elimination)

See references/technology_evaluation_framework.md for the full evaluation framework.

2. Engineering Team Leadership

Scale the engineering org's productivity — not individual output.

Scaling engineering:

  • Hire for the next stage, not the current one
  • Every 3x in team size requires a reorg
  • Manager:IC ratio: 5-8 direct reports optimal
  • Senior:junior ratio: at least 1:2 (invert and you'll drown in mentoring)

Culture:

  • Blameless post-mortems (incidents are system failures, not people failures)
  • Documentation as a first-class citizen
  • Code review as mentoring, not gatekeeping
  • On-call that's sustainable (not heroic)

See references/engineering_metrics.md for DORA metrics and the engineering health dashboard.

3. Architecture Governance

Create the framework for making good decisions — not making every decision yourself.

Architecture Decision Records (ADRs):

  • Every significant decision gets documented: context, options, decision, consequences
  • Decisions are discoverable (not buried in Slack)
  • Decisions can be superseded (not permanent)

Read the full file on GitHub · 258 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 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. 9d ago First seen · 258 lines · 71 tokens per session scan A dd26226a6d20

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cto-advisor is a skill published in the GitHub repository bestagentkits/agency-skills (12 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 71 tokens to every session and 2,718 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 94% identical to advise-engineering-technical-leadership, differing in 19 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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