performance-optimization

A method for improving software speed or resource use by measuring it first. It uses profiling, which shows where a program spends time or memory, followed by before-and-after checks.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for reported production performance problems, performance-sensitive code, and changes that need measured proof of improvement.
Why use it?
It prevents developers from optimizing the wrong part of a system or relying on guesses about what is slow.

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/developersglobal/ai-agent-skills/performance-optimization
Any agent
npx skills add DevelopersGlobal/ai-agent-skills --skill performance-optimization
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/DevelopersGlobal/ai-agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 23 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 667 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 $0.00023 $0.00667
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.00333
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00133
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00067

Measured 2d ago against content hash 7132348c08a7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

performance-optimization 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 2d 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/performance-optimization/SKILL.md · 77 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 77 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Overview

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. But ignoring performance until it's a crisis is equally harmful. This skill enforces data-driven optimization: profile first, optimize the bottleneck, measure the improvement.

When to Use

  • When performance issues are reported in production
  • Before optimizing any code (to ensure you're optimizing the right thing)
  • When reviewing changes that touch performance-sensitive paths

Process

Step 1: Measure the Baseline

  1. Reproduce the performance issue reliably.
  2. Measure current performance: latency p50/p95/p99, throughput, memory, CPU.
  3. Profile to find the actual bottleneck — not where you think it is.
  4. Write the performance test you'll use to validate improvement.

Verify: You have concrete baseline numbers, not gut feelings.

Step 2: Identify the Real Bottleneck

  1. Use profiling tools: flame graphs, CPU profiles, memory profiles.
  2. Find the top 3 hotspots by actual execution time (not lines of code).
  3. The bottleneck is rarely where you expect it to be. Trust the data.

Verify: Bottleneck identified by profiling data, not assumption.

Step 3: Optimize Only the Bottleneck

  1. Fix only the profiled bottleneck — nothing else.
  2. Common optimizations by type:
    • CPU: Algorithmic improvement (O(n²) → O(n log n)), caching, batching
    • Memory: Streaming instead of buffering, object pooling, lazy loading
    • I/O: Connection pooling, N+1 query elimination, caching, async/parallel calls
    • AI: Prompt caching, batch inference, smaller models for simpler tasks

Verify: Change targets the profiled bottleneck, not speculative improvements.

Step 4: Measure the Improvement

  1. Run the same performance test from Step 1.
  2. Compare before vs. after metrics.
  3. If improvement < 20%: the optimization may not be worth the complexity.

Verify: Improvement measured with the same test harness as baseline.

Common Rationalizations (and Rebuttals)

Excuse Rebuttal
"I know where the bottleneck is" You're probably wrong. Profile first.
"This is clearly slow" "Clearly slow" rarely matches profiler output. Measure.
"We'll optimize later" If it's slow enough to mention, it's slow enough to measure now.

Read the full file on GitHub · 77 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. 2d ago First seen · 77 lines · 23 tokens per session scan A 7132348c08a7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

performance-optimization is a skill published in the GitHub repository DevelopersGlobal/ai-agent-skills (65 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 23 tokens to every session and 667 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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