engram-commit-hygiene

A set of Git and GitHub rules for naming branches and writing commits in the Engram project. Conventional Commits are a standard format such as `fix: correct login error` that identifies the kind of change.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when creating commits or branches, reviewing pull-request history, or cleaning staged changes. It also guides logical commit grouping and excludes temporary or generated files.
Why use it?
It prevents commits and branches from being rejected by repository rules and keeps project history understandable.

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/gentleman-programming/engram/commit-hygiene
Any agent
npx skills add Gentleman-Programming/engram --skill commit-hygiene
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Gentleman-Programming/engram

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 37 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,069 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 $0.00037 $0.01069
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00535
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00214
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00107

Measured yesterday against content hash c605c942b213, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

engram-commit-hygiene 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 yesterday.

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/commit-hygiene/SKILL.md · 138 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 138 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

When to Use

Use this skill when:

  • Creating commits
  • Creating or naming branches
  • Reviewing commit history in a PR
  • Cleaning up staged changes

Critical Rules

  1. Commit messages MUST follow Conventional Commits — enforced by GitHub ruleset, rejected on push if invalid
  2. Branch names MUST follow type/description format — enforced by GitHub ruleset, rejected on push if invalid
  3. Keep one logical change per commit
  4. Message should explain why, not only what
  5. NEVER include Co-Authored-By trailers
  6. NEVER commit generated/temp/local files

Commit Message Format (enforced by GitHub ruleset)

Regex: ^(build|chore|ci|docs|feat|fix|perf|refactor|revert|style|test)(\([a-z0-9\._-]+\))?!?: .+

<type>(<optional-scope>): <description>
<type>(<optional-scope>)!: <description>   ← breaking change

Allowed Types

Type Purpose
feat New feature
fix Bug fix
docs Documentation only
refactor Code refactoring (no behavior change)
chore Maintenance, dependencies
style Formatting, whitespace
perf Performance improvement
test Adding or fixing tests
build Build system changes
ci CI/CD pipeline changes
revert Revert a previous commit

Rules

  • Type MUST be lowercase, one of the listed values
  • Scope is optional, lowercase, allows a-z, 0-9, ., _, -
  • ! before : marks a breaking change
  • Description MUST start after : (colon + space)
  • Description should be imperative mood ("add", not "added" or "adds")

Valid Examples

feat(cli): add --json flag to session list command
fix(store): prevent duplicate observation insert on retry
docs(contributing): update workflow documentation
refactor(internal): extract search query sanitizer
chore(deps): bump github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea to v0.26
style(tui): fix alignment in session detail view
perf(store): optimize FTS5 query for large datasets
test(sync): add coverage for conflict resolution
ci(workflows): split e2e into separate job
fix!: change session ID format

Read the full file on GitHub · 138 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. yesterday First seen · 138 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A c605c942b213

Subscribe to this mod's changes

engram-commit-hygiene is a skill published in the GitHub repository Gentleman-Programming/engram (6,232 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 1,069 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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