Compound Engineering is a plugin that organizes software work into brainstorming, planning, implementation, review, and recording lessons for future changes. It is used with AI coding agents including Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex, and the catalogue entries provide parts of its agent, skill, command, and hook workflow.
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 EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin --skill ce-explaingit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-pluginWrote 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/everyinc/compound-engineering-plugin/ce-explain)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/everyinc/compound-engineering-plugin/ce-explain"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/everyinc/compound-engineering-plugin/ce-explain/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/everyinc/compound-engineering-plugin/ce-explain"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/everyinc/compound-engineering-plugin/ce-explain.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Socket pass
- Snyk warn
- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to medium
These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →
- medium Privilege Escalation · line 48 Commands invoke sudo or root privileges. Verify this elevated access is necessary and justified.Fix: Avoid sudo/root unless strictly required. Prefer least-privilege patterns. If elevation is needed, document the justification and scope.
- medium Privilege Escalation · line 50 Commands invoke sudo or root privileges. Verify this elevated access is necessary and justified.Fix: Avoid sudo/root unless strictly required. Prefer least-privilege patterns. If elevation is needed, document the justification and scope.
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 | $0.00046 | $0.01830 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00018 | $0.00732 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00366 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00183 |
Grade B, and why
ce-explain scanned grade B with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 1mo ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Asks for rootmediumPrivilege escalation
A mod that escalates privileges can change anything on the machine, not only the project.
chmod 700 "$SCRATCH_ROOT" || exit 1; How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 82 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Explain How and Why
Produce an explanation that answers the scoped question and gives its consumer enough understanding for the intended use. The subject and purpose come from the request and available context, whether a person or another workflow supplied them. Ground project behavior in source evidence; distinguish documented rationale, inference, and unknowns.
Done: deliver the explanation with supporting evidence and material unanswered questions, or return the specific blocker. When an artifact is requested, deliver the artifact and its location. Publication is a separate action, not a condition of having explained the subject.
Consumer and interaction
Adapt depth and presentation to the intended readers and use. A person may need a working answer; a calling agent may need a teaching artifact for someone else. Do not infer the output from the caller's identity alone. When contributing to an ongoing workflow, deliver the requested result and leave continuation to its owner, the calling workflow. Do not add destination menus or follow-up offers to that return.
Resolve discoverable facts before asking. Ask only when missing information materially changes the answer and cannot be resolved from the request or evidence. If interaction is unavailable, return the unresolved question and its consequence rather than waiting or inventing an answer. A result may explain verified behavior while reporting that its historical rationale is unknown.
Read references/orchestration.md before grounding, the first blocking question, or subagent dispatch. It defines evidence gathering, tool use, model tiers, and their fallbacks.
Artifact Root
An explainer lands under <root>/explainers/ only when archived to the repo, and learnings may be read under <root>/solutions/. Resolve <root> only when you compose such a path; a scratch-only or external-concept run never composes one. Pass the resolved path to any subagent, not the config.
Resolve the CE artifact root <root> before composing any artifact path.
What ships with it
8 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.
- 1mo ago Changed · +2 lines fe1a05fa4293
- 1mo ago Changed · -17 tokens per session ca9e0b3f7567
- 1mo ago Changed c076fb8ac399
- 1mo ago Changed · +3 lines · -12 tokens per session ae36114f0960
- 1mo ago Changed · -10 lines a1ce4015b2cb
- 1mo ago First seen · 87 lines · 75 tokens per session scan B c82a84aeb32e
ce-explain is a skill published in the GitHub repository EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin (25,741 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 46 tokens to every session and 1,830 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (asks for root). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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