pragmatic-programmer

pragmatic-programmer is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from DamiMartinez/book-skills. It costs 195 tokens per session (1,517 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A software-development guide based on The Pragmatic Programmer, a book about practical design, coding, debugging, and maintenance principles.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when reviewing designs, planning changes, debugging, refactoring, or deciding how to separate and simplify software components.
Why use it?
It provides checklists for reducing duplicated knowledge, limiting the impact of changes, avoiding fragile assumptions, and improving existing code.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it when reviewing designs, planning changes, debugging, refactoring, or deciding how to separate and simplify software components.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/damimartinez/book-skills/pragmatic-programmer
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 DamiMartinez/book-skills --skill pragmatic-programmer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/DamiMartinez/book-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 pragmatic-programmer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/damimartinez/book-skills/pragmatic-programmer/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/damimartinez/book-skills/pragmatic-programmer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/damimartinez/book-skills/pragmatic-programmer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/damimartinez/book-skills/pragmatic-programmer/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 pragmatic-programmer

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/damimartinez/book-skills/pragmatic-programmer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/damimartinez/book-skills/pragmatic-programmer.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 195 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,517 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 $0.00195 $0.01517
Opus 5 $0.00097 $0.00758
Sonnet 5 $0.00039 $0.00303
Haiku 4.5 $0.00019 $0.00152

Measured 9d ago against content hash 433d57a508d9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pragmatic-programmer 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/pragmatic-programmer/SKILL.md · 54 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 54 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

The Pragmatic Programmer

Apply this skill to day-to-day software design, coding-practice, debugging, and requirements questions using the Pragmatic Programmer's checklist-style principles, drawn from the 2019 20th Anniversary (2nd) Edition.

Core concepts

DRY — Don't Repeat Yourself — Every piece of knowledge (not just code text) should have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation in the system. Duplicated logic, duplicated data schemas, duplicated documentation-vs-code all count. When reviewing code or a design, look for knowledge duplication, not just copy-pasted lines.

Orthogonality — Design components so a change in one has no ripple effect on unrelated ones. Ask "if I change this, what else could break that has no logical connection to it?" Low orthogonality shows up as fragile systems where small changes cause surprising failures elsewhere.

Reversibility — Avoid decisions that are hard to undo (a specific vendor, a rigid architecture, a hardcoded assumption) when a reversible alternative is available at similar cost. Not every decision needs maximum flexibility — but flag when a design bakes in an assumption (a database choice, a third-party API) that will be expensive to change later.

Tracer bullets & prototypes — For unclear or risky requirements, build a thin end-to-end skeleton that actually runs (a tracer bullet) to get real feedback fast, as opposed to a throwaway prototype meant to explore/discard one specific unknown. Know which one the situation calls for: tracer bullets get kept and built on; prototypes get thrown away once they've answered their question.

Broken windows & boiled frogs — Visible small decay (a broken window: sloppy code, a "TODO" left too long, a hacky workaround) signals that decay is acceptable and invites more of it — fix it or explicitly flag/timestamp it. "Boiled frog" is the danger of not noticing gradual degradation because no single step looks alarming — periodically zoom out and reassess from scratch.

Read the full file on GitHub · 54 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 · 54 lines · 195 tokens per session scan A 433d57a508d9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pragmatic-programmer is a skill published in the GitHub repository DamiMartinez/book-skills (11 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 195 tokens to every session and 1,517 once invoked, about $0.0010 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

hr-onboarding

A new-hire onboarding plan as a single page — first week schedule, buddy + manager intro, learning track, equipment checklist, and "you're set when…" outcomes. Use when the brief mentions "onboarding", "new hire", "first week plan", or "入职".

nexu-io/open-design · 62 tokens

book-mirror

Take any book (EPUB/PDF), produce a personalized chapter-by-chapter analysis. Each chapter is preserved in detail (The Chapter) and mirrored back to the reader's actual life (The Mirror) using brain context. The mirror observes and resonates — a friend pointing out parallels, NOT a consultant rearranging the reader's…

garrytan/gbrain · 138 tokens

miniapp

Build a tiny interactive HTML playground only when someone asks to see, play with, or step through a mechanism.

yc-software/qm · 25 tokens

eli5

Explain research, papers, or technical ideas in plain English with minimal jargon, concrete analogies, and clear takeaways. Use when the user says "ELI5 this", asks for a simple explanation of a paper or research result, wants jargon removed, or asks what something technically dense actually means.

companion-inc/feynman · 63 tokens

deck-course-module

A course or workshop slide template with persistent learning goals, teaching pages, multiple-choice self-tests, and a wrap-up.

nexu-io/html-anything · 25 tokens

master-yinguang

A reference-based assistant for questions about Yinguang and Pure Land Buddhism, a Buddhist tradition focused on faith, ethical living, and practice connected with rebirth in the Pure Land. It can answer in Yinguang’s historical teaching style.

xr843/Master-skill · 274 tokens