build-your-own-x

build-your-own-x is a skill for Claude Code from mahmoud20138/Tradecraft. It costs 59 tokens per session (1,760 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A collection of step-by-step tutorials for rebuilding technologies from scratch, including databases, operating systems, compilers, Docker, Git, web servers, and neural networks. It is a learning reference rather than a single software library.

In plain words
What is it for?
Learning systems fundamentals, following build-your-own projects, studying compilers, networking, operating systems, databases, shells, blockchain, game engines, and machine-learning systems.
Why use it?
It helps explain how familiar technologies work internally by guiding you through small working implementations.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the tradecraft plugin — 58 skills shipped together

Good fit Learning systems fundamentals, following build-your-own projects, studying compilers, networking, operating systems, databases, shells, blockchain, game engines, and machine-learning systems.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mahmoud20138/tradecraft/build-your-own-x
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 mahmoud20138/Tradecraft --skill build-your-own-x
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mahmoud20138/Tradecraft

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install tradecraft, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 58 skills.

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 build-your-own-x

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mahmoud20138/tradecraft/build-your-own-x/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mahmoud20138/tradecraft/build-your-own-x)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mahmoud20138/tradecraft/build-your-own-x"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mahmoud20138/tradecraft/build-your-own-x/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 build-your-own-x

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mahmoud20138/tradecraft/build-your-own-x"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mahmoud20138/tradecraft/build-your-own-x.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 59 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,760 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. 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 $0.00059 $0.01760
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00880
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00352
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00176

Measured 12d ago against content hash fac33b2182df, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

build-your-own-x 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 12d 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.

plugins/tradecraft/skills/build-your-own-x/SKILL.md · 164 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 164 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

build-your-own-x

USE FOR:

  • "build X from scratch / implement X yourself"
  • "how does Docker/Git/database/web server actually work"
  • "deep dive into how technology X is implemented"
  • "learning compilers / interpreters / OS / networking internals"
  • "implement neural network from scratch"
  • "write your own shell / regex engine / search engine"
  • "understand blockchain / BitTorrent internals" tags: [education, from-scratch, systems, compilers, OS, database, Docker, Git, neural-network, blockchain, web-server, shell, regex] kind: reference category: pro-code-architecture

What Is Build-Your-Own-X?

Curated repo of step-by-step tutorials for recreating popular technologies from scratch.

"What I cannot create, I do not understand." — Richard Feynman


Complete Category Reference

# Category What You Build Languages
1 3D Renderer Ray tracer, rasterizer, path tracer C, C++, Java, JS, Python, Rust
2 AI Model GPT, diffusion model, CLIP, NeRF Python, C++
3 Augmented Reality AR overlay, marker tracking JS, Python
4 BitTorrent Client Peer-to-peer file sharing Go, Haskell, JS, Python, Rust
5 Blockchain / Crypto Bitcoin-like chain, smart contracts Go, Haskell, Java, JS, Python, Rust
6 Bot Chatbot, IRC bot, Slack bot Go, Java, JS, Python
7 Command-Line Tool CLI parser, progress bar, formatter Go, Python, Rust
8 Database SQL engine, key-value store, Redis clone C, C++, Go, Java, Python, Rust
9 Docker Container runtime, image builder Go, Python
10 Emulator / VM CHIP-8, NES, Game Boy emulator C, C++, Go, Java, JS, Rust
11 Frontend Framework React-like library, virtual DOM, JSX JS, TS
12 Game Tetris, chess, Minecraft clone C, C++, Go, Java, JS, Python
13 Git Version control from scratch Go, Python, Haskell, Ruby
14 Memory Allocator malloc/free implementation C
15 Network Stack TCP/IP stack, HTTP client C, Go, Python
16 Neural Network Backprop from scratch, CNN, RNN C, C++, Java, JS, Python
17 Operating System Bootloader, kernel, process scheduler C, Rust
18 Physics Engine Rigid body, collision detection C++, JS
19 Processor RISC-V CPU in HDL or emulation C, Python
20 Programming Language Interpreter, compiler, VM, LISP C, Go, Haskell, Java, JS, Python, Rust
21 Regex Engine NFA/DFA regex from scratch C, Go, Java, JS, Python
22 Search Engine Inverted index, TF-IDF, BM25 Python, Ruby
23 Shell Bash-like shell, job control C, Go, Python, Rust
24 Template Engine Jinja/Mustache-like JS, Python
25 Text Editor Vim-like, kilo editor C
26 Visual Recognition MNIST classifier, face detection Python
27 Voxel Engine Minecraft-style 3D world C++
28 Web Browser HTML parser, CSS layout, DOM Python, Haskell
29 Web Server HTTP/1.1, static file server C, Go, Java, Python, Rust
30 Distributed Systems Kafka-like, Raft consensus, MapReduce Go, Java, Python

Read the full file on GitHub · 164 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. 12d ago First seen · 164 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A fac33b2182df

Subscribe to this mod's changes

build-your-own-x is a skill published in the GitHub repository mahmoud20138/Tradecraft (15 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 59 tokens to every session and 1,760 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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