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 skills add d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook --skill kubernetes-operator-developmentgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbookWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/kubernetes-operator-development)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/kubernetes-operator-development"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/kubernetes-operator-development/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/kubernetes-operator-development"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/kubernetes-operator-development.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00072 | $0.01504 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00036 | $0.00752 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00014 | $0.00301 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00007 | $0.00150 |
Grade A, and why
kubernetes-operator-development scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured today.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 161 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Kubernetes Operator Development
Mandatory controller and cluster-mutation gates live in the Kubernetes rule
(${HANDBOOK_ROOT}/rules/450-kubernetes.mdc). This skill owns the operator
design and implementation workflow. Use the Kubernetes containers skill
(${HANDBOOK_ROOT}/skills/kubernetes-containers/SKILL.md) for workloads,
Helm, Argo CD, and cluster operations.
Core Contract
A custom resource expresses desired intent. Reconciliation observes desired and actual state, performs retry-safe work, and records what was observed. Events only indicate that state might have changed; they are not durable exactly-once commands.
Every design must answer:
- What is authoritative, and which fields does this controller own?
- How is each external resource identified and ownership-verified?
- What happens after duplicate delivery, restart, timeout, or lost response?
- What is safe to create, adopt, update, retain, and delete?
- What makes each condition current for the resource generation?
- What bounds retries, provider calls, concurrency, and tenant impact?
- How are API and operator upgrades rolled forward and back?
Do not implement a one-shot provisioning workflow inside Reconcile.
Decide Whether to Build an Operator
Prefer an existing Kubernetes API, vendor operator, Crossplane provider, cloud service operator, or composition mechanism when it already provides the required ownership and lifecycle semantics.
Build a custom operator when continuous convergence, a domain-specific API, multi-resource ownership, or custom lifecycle policy creates clear platform value. Do not wrap a trivial remote API call merely to expose it as a CRD.
Design Before Coding
Complete the design review template
(${HANDBOOK_ROOT}/skills/kubernetes-operator-development/references/design-review-template.md)
before scaffolding implementation. Resolve:
- API intent, scope, maturity, and compatibility.
- Source of truth and field ownership.
- External identity, collision prevention, and adoption proof.
- finalizer, deletion, orphan, and recovery behavior.
- status conditions and readiness semantics.
- retry, rate-limit, timeout, and concurrency budgets.
- authentication, Kubernetes RBAC, and provider authorization.
- test, upgrade, observability, and rollback evidence.
What ships with it
5 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.
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.
- today First seen · 161 lines · 72 tokens per session scan A 97b0aab3a607
kubernetes-operator-development is a skill published in the GitHub repository d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook (17 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 72 tokens to every session and 1,504 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-09-12.
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