reverse-engineer

A guided method for examining an authorized codebase, program, or product and documenting what it can do. It produces a checkable feature inventory and a map of what might be worth adopting.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess a competitor or upstream project, decide whether to fork it, or compare it with an in-house build. It helps record features, supporting evidence, and adoption decisions.
Why use it?
It replaces decisions based on a README or first impressions with findings that can be verified against the source and recorded evidence. It also sets boundaries for authorized analysis and avoiding proprietary reproduction.

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/boshu2/agentops/reverse-engineer
Any agent
npx skills add boshu2/agentops --skill reverse-engineer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/boshu2/agentops

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 62 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,933 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 $0.00062 $0.02933
Opus 5 $0.00031 $0.01466
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00587
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00293

Measured 2d ago against content hash 03e3071260f9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

reverse-engineer 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 2d 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.

images/gemini/skills/reverse-engineer/SKILL.md · 197 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 197 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Reverse Engineer

Reverse-engineer an external system into two things: a mechanically-verifiable teardown (feature inventory + registry + specs, optionally a security audit) and a steal-map — what to adopt into our surfaces, what to leave behind. The teardown is the evidence; the steal-map is the decision. Separating them works because a decision row that must cite a registry entry can be re-checked by anyone, while a decision made from impressions cannot be re-checked by its own author. The original failure mode this skill exists to prevent: reading a competitor's README and "deciding" from vibes.

Triggers: "reverse-engineer X", "tear down Y", "what should we steal from Z", "evaluate competitor/upstream", "should we fork/adopt/build-native".

⚠️ Constraints — Hard Guardrails (MANDATORY)

  • Only operate on code/binaries you own or have explicit written authorization to analyze — this matters because unauthorized teardown is the legal/IP line.
  • Do not provide steps to bypass protections/ToS or to extract proprietary source/system prompts.
  • Do not output reconstructed proprietary source or embedded prompts (index only; redact in reports) — to prevent reproducing protected IP.
  • Redact secrets/tokens/keys if encountered; run the secret-scan gate over outputs to prevent credential leakage.
  • Always separate docs say vs code proves vs hosted/control-plane.

Phase 1 — Mechanical teardown (the script)

Produce evidence, not vibes. The script clones (pinned), scans CLI/config/artifact surface, and writes a feature inventory + machine-checkable registry + spec set.

python3 skills/reverse-engineer/scripts/reverse_engineer.py <product> --mode=repo \
  --upstream-repo="https://github.com/org/repo.git" --upstream-ref=v1.0.0 \
  --output-dir=".agents/scratch/reverse-engineer/<product>/"

Binary mode requires --authorized (see Invocation Contract + Self-Test). Use the bundled demo fixture if you lack authorization for a real binary.

Read the full file on GitHub · 197 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. 2d ago First seen · 197 lines · 62 tokens per session scan A 03e3071260f9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

reverse-engineer is a skill published in the GitHub repository boshu2/agentops (431 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 62 tokens to every session and 2,933 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 2026-08-30.

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