agent-engineering

agent-engineering is a skill for Claude Code from ckorhonen/claude-skills. It costs 62 tokens per session (1,919 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of engineering guidelines for making AI coding agents plan work, delegate tasks, learn from mistakes, and verify their results.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when writing agent instructions such as AGENTS.md, configuring coding agents or subagents, onboarding an agent to a complex project, or reviewing agent output.
Why use it?
It helps reduce repeated errors, unclear changes, and unfinished work when an AI agent operates in a codebase.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions subagents; mentions AGENTS.md.

Part of the claude-skills plugin — 62 skills, 4 commands, 7 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it when writing agent instructions such as AGENTS.md, configuring coding agents or subagents, onboarding an agent to a complex project, or reviewing agent output.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ckorhonen/claude-skills/agent-engineering
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 ckorhonen/claude-skills --skill agent-engineering
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ckorhonen/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install claude-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 62 skills, 4 commands, 7 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 agent-engineering

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ckorhonen/claude-skills/agent-engineering/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ckorhonen/claude-skills/agent-engineering)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ckorhonen/claude-skills/agent-engineering"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ckorhonen/claude-skills/agent-engineering/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 agent-engineering

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ckorhonen/claude-skills/agent-engineering"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ckorhonen/claude-skills/agent-engineering.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 62 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,919 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 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 $0.00062 $0.01919
Opus 5 $0.00031 $0.00959
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00384
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00192

Measured 9d ago against content hash 72a35b2d1369, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

agent-engineering 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.

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/agent-engineering/SKILL.md · 223 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 223 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Agent Engineering Principles

Battle-tested principles for AI coding agents that produce reliable, high-quality work.

When to Use This Skill

  • Writing or reviewing an AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md / CURSOR.md file for a project
  • Configuring a new AI coding agent or subagent
  • Diagnosing why an agent keeps making the same mistakes
  • Reviewing agent output quality and identifying systemic issues
  • Onboarding an agent to a complex codebase

1. Plan Mode Default

  • Enter plan mode for ANY non-trivial task (3+ steps or architectural decisions)
  • If something goes sideways, STOP and re-plan immediately — don't keep pushing
  • Use plan mode for verification steps, not just building
  • Write detailed specs upfront to reduce ambiguity

When to skip: Simple, single-file edits with obvious solutions.

Example plan format (tasks/todo.md):

## Task: Migrate auth to JWT

### Plan
- [ ] Audit current session-based auth flow
- [ ] Design JWT payload schema (user_id, roles, expiry)
- [ ] Implement token generation in auth service
- [ ] Update middleware to validate JWT
- [ ] Write tests for edge cases (expired, invalid, revoked)
- [ ] Update docs

### Done
- [x] Audit complete — 4 routes need updating

2. Subagent Strategy

  • Use subagents liberally to keep main context window clean
  • Offload research, exploration, and parallel analysis to subagents
  • For complex problems, throw more compute at it via subagents
  • One task per subagent for focused execution

Key insight: Context window pollution is the #1 cause of agent quality degradation. Subagents are cheap — use them.

When to spawn a subagent vs. do it inline:

Use a subagent Do inline
Research task (>10 files) Simple 1-file edit
Independent parallel work Quick config change
Long-running compilation or test run Single command with clear output
Isolated experiment (risky change) Trivial refactor

3. Self-Improvement Loop

After ANY correction from the user:

Read the full file on GitHub · 223 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. 9d ago First seen · 223 lines · 62 tokens per session scan A 72a35b2d1369

Subscribe to this mod's changes

agent-engineering is a skill published in the GitHub repository ckorhonen/claude-skills (14 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 62 tokens to every session and 1,919 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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