ia-c-systems

ia-c-systems is a skill for Claude Code from iliaal/whetstone. It costs 84 tokens per session (912 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A C programming skill for systems code, libraries, and native extensions. It covers code structure, error handling, memory safety, undefined behaviour, and performance measurement.

In plain words
What is it for?
Writing, reviewing, refactoring, or debugging C code, including work involving malloc, sanitizers, Valgrind, or native extensions.
Why use it?
C code can fail through buffer overflows, incorrect memory lifetimes, or undefined behaviour, so these concerns need deliberate checks.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: paths in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions AGENTS.md.

Part of the whetstone plugin — 32 skills, 22 commands, 19 agents, 1 hook, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Writing, reviewing, refactoring, or debugging C code, including work involving malloc, sanitizers, Valgrind, or native extensions.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/iliaal/whetstone/ia-c-systems
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.

Any agent
npx skills add iliaal/whetstone --skill ia-c-systems
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/iliaal/whetstone

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install whetstone, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 32 skills, 22 commands, 19 agents, 1 hook, 1 MCP server.

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 ia-c-systems

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/iliaal/whetstone/ia-c-systems/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/iliaal/whetstone/ia-c-systems)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/iliaal/whetstone/ia-c-systems"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/iliaal/whetstone/ia-c-systems/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for ia-c-systems

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/iliaal/whetstone/ia-c-systems"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/iliaal/whetstone/ia-c-systems.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 84 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 912 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00084 $0.00912
Opus 5 $0.00042 $0.00456
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00182
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00091

Measured yesterday against content hash e52c7c71de1a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ia-c-systems scanned grade A 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 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

| `goto cleanup` / `goto err` | Kernel, OpenSSL, curl, php-src: the dominant multi-resource release idiom |
plugins/whetstone/skills/ia-c-systems/SKILL.md · 67 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 67 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

C Systems & Native Code

Covers C11 and later for libraries, systems code, and native extensions. For C++ (RAII, templates, move semantics), see the ia-cpp-systems skill.

Working rules

  • Preserve the repository's sanctioned idioms and ABI; do not turn a scoped fix into a restyle.
  • State ownership, check fallible calls, validate public boundaries, and assert internal invariants.
  • Bound traversal of external input and check sizes before allocation or narrowing.
  • Choose helpers only when they name a concept, own an error, or isolate a side effect.
  • Verify the actual rebuilt artifact; use instrumented tests for safety and representative release builds for performance.

Repo conventions outrank this skill

Read the repo's AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md, its public headers, and two adjacent .c files before writing anything. Where they conflict with the rules below, they win, and the diff carries no note about it.

This gate is load-bearing. Established C codebases sanction idioms these rules would otherwise flag:

Local idiom Where it is correct
Tab indentation php-src and its extensions, Linux kernel
goto cleanup / goto err Kernel, OpenSSL, curl, php-src: the dominant multi-resource release idiom
Macros containing return RETURN_*/RETVAL_* in PHP extensions, Py_RETURN_* in CPython
Project status types zend_result, CURLcode, int plus errno: do not invent a parallel enum beside one

Never widen a scoped task into a repo-wide restyle because adjacent untouched C predates a rule here.

When the target is a PHP extension (php_*.h, PHP_FUNCTION, zend_, config.m4), load php-extension-c.md before applying any rule below. Layout, macros, the error model, memory, and assertions all carry extension-specific overrides, and the memory one in particular inverts the base guidance: extensions use a request-scoped allocator, not malloc/free.

Verify

  • Build passes under the repo's warning profile with zero newly introduced warnings (greenfield: the full -Wall -Wextra -Werror -Wconversion -Wshadow bundle, zero warnings)
  • Test suite passes under -fsanitize=address,undefined with zero reports
  • valgrind --leak-check=full --error-exitcode=1 clean where the suite links under it
  • Every new fallible call site checked; every new error value traced to one producer
  • Every new state-mutating leaf carries an assert
  • No new goto outside the repo's sanctioned form or the single-forward-jump cleanup; no recursion over external input; no loop over external input without a named bound

Read the full file on GitHub · 67 lines

Files

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.

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 Changed · -136 lines e52c7c71de1a
  2. 2d ago First seen · 203 lines · 84 tokens per session scan A 1b936dc4293c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ia-c-systems is a skill published in the GitHub repository iliaal/whetstone (33 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 84 tokens to every session and 912 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-07.

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