engineering-standards

engineering-standards is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from bostonaholic/team. It costs 26 tokens per session (1,053 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for planning, writing, and reviewing software code using clear designs, simple interfaces, and practical quality checks. It also explains when tests and abstractions are worth their maintenance cost.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it during technical design, implementation, code review, or decisions about tests, interfaces, comments, failure isolation, and repeated code.
Why use it?
It reduces tangled code, unnecessary layers, unclear comments, and tests that do not catch real problems. The guidance helps teams make consistent engineering decisions.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the team plugin — 88 skills, 13 agents, 2 hooks shipped together

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/bostonaholic/team/engineering-standards
Any agent
npx skills add bostonaholic/team --skill engineering-standards
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bostonaholic/team

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install team, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 88 skills, 13 agents, 2 hooks.

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 engineering-standards

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bostonaholic/team/engineering-standards.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bostonaholic/team/engineering-standards)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bostonaholic/team/engineering-standards"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bostonaholic/team/engineering-standards.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 26 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,053 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 $0.00026 $0.01053
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.00526
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00211
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00105

Measured today against content hash 973bf7a5068c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

engineering-standards 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 today.

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/engineering-standards/SKILL.md · 64 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 64 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Clean Code Methodology

The design and implementation bar for planner, implementer, and code-reviewer.

Core Philosophy

  • Hickey: simple immutable data and pure functions.
  • Carmack: direct implementation with a way to measure performance.
  • Armstrong: isolate failures so one module cannot propagate faults.
  • Knuth: clarity before cleverness.
  • Liskov: honor contracts; skills/solid/SKILL.md owns LSP/SRP.
  • Ousterhout: deep modules with simple interfaces; keep complexity inside.

Weigh benefit against maintenance, runtime, false-positive, and cognitive costs. Apply Rule of Three: tolerate second duplication; extract on the third.

Code Comments

These rules govern source comments; review findings use skills/conventional-comments/SKILL.md. Comments never explain WHAT code does. Permit only non-obvious WHY—constraints, workarounds, surprising requirements—when names, structure, and tests cannot carry it.

  • Rewrite first. Before adding a comment, try a named function or variable.
  • No ticket/issue IDs, plan/slice/phase markers, or doc-section references. A public upstream-issue URL that is itself the why is allowed; internal trackers and pipeline artifacts are not.
  • No process narration. State current code constraints. Never mention dates, corrections, edit history, users/prompts, review feedback, ticket discussion, or agent instructions. “Previously,” “Originally,” “As of,” “Correction,” “Temporary fix from,” and “This was changed because” are detection hints, not the rule.
  • Document deliberate constraints. Name the consequence of removing odd code: API limits, compatibility, security, performance, ordering, concurrency, or framework behavior.
  • Be local, concise, precise, verified. Use symbols/stable identifiers, not line numbers or layout. Never say only “handle edge case.”
  • Do not duplicate types, tests, names, or public docs. Link an external spec only for a precise contract.
  • No commented-out code. No TODO/FIXME in delivered code. Deferred work belongs in the implementer report.
  • Remove obsolete comments in the same diff; preserve repo style.
  • The why-only rule covers in-body comments. Doc comments on exported/public interfaces must add contract facts absent from the signature; restating a signature is a WHAT comment.

Read the full file on GitHub · 64 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. today Changed · -92 lines · -10 tokens per session scan B → A 973bf7a5068c
  2. yesterday Changed · -1 lines 623ce7807c99
  3. 5d ago First seen · 157 lines · 36 tokens per session scan B 75faa832fa7b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

engineering-standards is a skill published in the GitHub repository bostonaholic/team (11 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 26 tokens to every session and 1,053 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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