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.
npx agentmods add skills/buildmoonshot/skillpacks/read-before-editnpx skills add buildmoonshot/skillpacks --skill read-before-editgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/buildmoonshot/skillpacksWhat 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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00055 | $0.00358 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00028 | $0.00179 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00011 | $0.00072 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00006 | $0.00036 |
Grade A, and why
read-before-edit 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 3d 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.
What it actually says
Read Before You Edit
Before changing existing code, read enough of it to understand what you're touching. Editing blind is how agents break working software.
What to do
-
Read the function/section you're changing — and the code immediately around it. Understand what it does and what depends on it before you touch a line.
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Find the existing patterns. How does this file name things, handle errors, structure logic? Match that, don't impose your own style.
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Check who calls it. A quick look at where a function is used tells you what you might break. Changing a signature or return value without checking callers is a classic self-inflicted bug.
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Reuse what's there. If the codebase already has a helper, a utility, or a pattern for what you need, use it instead of writing a parallel one. New code should look like it belongs.
The trap to avoid
Don't pattern-match on the name of a function and assume it does what you'd expect. Open it and confirm. The function called validateUser might also mutate state, log, or throw — assumptions about unread code are where bugs hide.
Why this matters
Most agent-introduced bugs aren't bad logic — they're good logic that didn't fit the existing code, broke an unseen caller, or duplicated something already there. Two minutes of reading prevents the kind of bug that takes an hour to trace.
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.
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.
- 3d ago First seen · 27 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A 586e3880fd95
read-before-edit is a skill published in the GitHub repository buildmoonshot/skillpacks (2 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 358 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 2026-08-31.
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