ce-optimize

A skill for improving a measurable result through repeated experiments and checks. It uses defined targets and stopping rules to decide when the work is finished.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to tune code, settings, or processes when success can be measured. It helps run experiments against several required targets and stop when the targets are met or progress is blocked.
Why use it?
It removes guesswork from optimization by showing whether each change improved the chosen measurements. It also records and verifies the final result.

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/everyinc/compound-engineering-plugin/ce-optimize
Any agent
npx skills add EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin --skill ce-optimize
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 19 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,469 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 $0.00019 $0.01469
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00734
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00294
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00147

Measured 2d ago against content hash e4733c2cec3b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ce-optimize 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 4 executable files (scripts/decide.mjs, scripts/experiment-worktree.sh, scripts/measure.sh, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/ce-optimize/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.

Iterative Optimization Loop

references/usage-guide.md covers hard metrics versus a judge, first-run defaults, and the expensive-benchmark shape (multiple required targets plus a measurement ladder).

Done when: a stopping criterion fired, every declared required target is met or another stop fired first, the final state is written and verified on disk, and the user has been given the post-completion options. If the run instead stopped at a gate it could not clear, say what blocked it.

Interaction Method

Use the host's blocking question tool already in the current tool list (match by capability, not by a host-specific name). Presence in the current tool list is proof the tool exists; never call a user-facing question tool to discover whether it exists. If a matching tool is listed but unloaded, use the host's tool-discovery primitive to load that capability — do not search for another host's tool name. Fall back to numbered options on the host's chat surface only when no such tool is in the list or a real question call errors. Never skip the question silently.

Artifact Root

Resolve <root> the first time you compose a path under it. Reading learnings under <root>/solutions/ counts as composing one. Give any subagent the resolved path, not the config.

Resolve the CE artifact root <root> before composing any artifact path.

  • Read docs_root from <repo-root>/.compound-engineering/config.yaml only (<repo-root> = git rev-parse --show-toplevel). Do not read it from config.local.yaml. Unset -> <root> is docs, exactly as before.
  • Validate a set value: a repo-relative directory whose real, symlink-resolved path stays inside the repo and is neither the repo root nor under .git/. Otherwise stop with an error naming docs_root and the value -- never fall back to docs.
  • Use <root> as the sole artifact location: create it if absent, compose each path as <root>/<subdir> with this skill's own subdirectory, and never also read docs.

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. 2d ago First seen · 54 lines · 19 tokens per session scan A e4733c2cec3b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ce-optimize is a skill published in the GitHub repository EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin (24,760 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 19 tokens to every session and 1,469 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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