investigate-codebase

investigate-codebase is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Data-System-School/agent-skills. It costs 125 tokens per session (1,961 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for building a clear, evidence-based understanding of an existing codebase or one of its data and control flows.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to trace requests or runtime behavior, explain a subsystem, inspect a branch or diff, and compare documented intent with the implementation.
Why use it?
It helps developers orient themselves in unfamiliar repositories and answer focused architecture, bug, or change-impact questions without reading everything.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/data-system-school/agent-skills/investigate-codebase
Any agent
npx skills add Data-System-School/agent-skills --skill investigate-codebase
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Data-System-School/agent-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 investigate-codebase

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/data-system-school/agent-skills/investigate-codebase.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/data-system-school/agent-skills/investigate-codebase)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/data-system-school/agent-skills/investigate-codebase"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/data-system-school/agent-skills/investigate-codebase.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 125 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,961 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 $0.00125 $0.01961
Opus 5 $0.00063 $0.00981
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00392
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00196

Measured 3d ago against content hash 68c773acbf76, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

investigate-codebase 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.

investigate-codebase/SKILL.md · 210 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 210 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Investigate Codebase

Objective

Build the minimum sufficient, falsifiable model needed to answer the user's question. Prefer a thin vertical slice over an exhaustive repository summary. Optimize for human understanding and verification, not the amount of code read.

Operating contract

  • Read all applicable repository and agent instruction files before inspecting implementation, including nested per-directory files under whichever convention the repository uses (for example AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, or CONTRIBUTING.md).
  • Default to read-only investigation. Do not edit files, install dependencies, switch branches, reset state, or alter durable resources unless the user requested that action.
  • Preserve unrelated and dirty worktree changes. Separate committed changes from local modifications before drawing conclusions.
  • Record the repository revision. For change analysis, resolve and record the exact base and head revisions rather than silently guessing.
  • Treat README files, architecture documents, comments, and PR descriptions as intent evidence that must be reconciled with implementation and behavior.
  • Start narrow. Expand scope only when a dependency, contract, contradiction, or unresolved hypothesis requires it.
  • Prefer version-control history, manifests, exact symbol references, fast repository-wide text search (rg, grep, or the equivalent available in the environment), language-native tooling, tests, and runtime observation. Use semantic or embedding search only to locate candidate code, never as behavioral proof.
  • Use whatever file-reading, search, and command-execution capabilities the host environment provides. If a capability required by a check is unavailable, record the check as UNKNOWN with the reason rather than substituting a weaker claim.
  • Ask before checks that may use production credentials, access external systems, mutate durable state, incur meaningful cost, or take substantial time.
  • Never equate passing tests, high coverage, or clean static analysis with proof of complete correctness.

Read the full file on GitHub · 210 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 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.

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. 3d ago First seen · 210 lines · 125 tokens per session scan A 68c773acbf76

Subscribe to this mod's changes

investigate-codebase is a skill published in the GitHub repository Data-System-School/agent-skills (9 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 125 tokens to every session and 1,961 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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