engineering-tutor

engineering-tutor is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from marchatton/agent-skills. It costs 65 tokens per session (505 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An engineering teaching guide that explains technical ideas with plain language, everyday comparisons, small examples, and diagrams.

In plain words
What is it for?
Learning engineering concepts, understanding design choices and trade-offs, exploring failure cases, and explaining ideas to others.
Why use it?
It helps people build an accurate mental model instead of only memorising definitions or code patterns.

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/marchatton/agent-skills/engineering-tutor
Any agent
npx skills add marchatton/agent-skills --skill engineering-tutor
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/marchatton/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 engineering-tutor

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marchatton/agent-skills/engineering-tutor.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/marchatton/agent-skills/engineering-tutor)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/marchatton/agent-skills/engineering-tutor"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marchatton/agent-skills/engineering-tutor.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 65 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 505 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 $0.00065 $0.00505
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00253
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00101
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00051

Measured 5d ago against content hash b3ea4b15ceb0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

engineering-tutor 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 5d 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.

.agents/skills/00-utilities/engineering-tutor/SKILL.md · 61 lines

What it actually says

Engineering Tutor

Protocol

  1. Quick context check (max 2 Qs)
  • Ask domain/goal + level.
  • If no answer, state assumptions in 1 line, proceed.
  1. Intuition first (plain English)
  • Explain like curious 12-year-old.
  • Short sentences. Minimal jargon.
  • If jargon needed: define immediately.
  1. Metaphor / analogy
  • Pick everyday physical metaphor.
  • Map parts explicitly.
  • Say where metaphor breaks + why.
  1. Visual (diagram)
  • If flow/structure/lifecycle/interaction exists: include diagram; render via beautiful-mermaid.
  • Keep small/readable; label nodes.
  • Introduce diagram, render (ASCII/Unicode default), then explain. Include code only if needed.
  • Choose type: flowchart / sequenceDiagram / stateDiagram / block.
  1. Step-by-step breakdown
  • Add one layer at a time.
  • Mark what is new vs already known.
  • Use tiny examples when helpful.
  • Call constraints/trade-offs/failure modes as you go.
  1. Common misunderstandings
  • List likely confusions, silent assumptions, edge cases.
  1. Teach-back loop
  • Ask user to explain back.
  • Identify weak spots; re-explain only those.
  • Use a different metaphor on retry.
  1. Save learnings to docs/96-engineering-tutor-learnings/ (create if missing; see docs/REPO-STRUCTURE.md)

Engineering mindset

Include at least one: inputs/outputs, constraints, trade-offs, failure modes, why this design vs alternatives.

Simplifications

If you simplify: say what you ignore, why ok now, what changes in full version.

Output format (default)

  1. Intuition first (plain English)
  2. Metaphor / analogy (mapping)
  3. Visual explanation (diagram via beautiful-mermaid)
  4. Step-by-step breakdown
  5. Common misunderstandings
  6. Check understanding (teach-back question)

If user says "just the answer"

Give short direct answer + 1-line intuition; offer optional diagram.

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. 5d ago First seen · 61 lines · 65 tokens per session scan A b3ea4b15ceb0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

engineering-tutor is a skill published in the GitHub repository marchatton/agent-skills (5 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 65 tokens to every session and 505 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 2026-08-31.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

hr-onboarding

A new-hire onboarding plan as a single page — first week schedule, buddy + manager intro, learning track, equipment checklist, and "you're set when…" outcomes. Use when the brief mentions "onboarding", "new hire", "first week plan", or "入职".

nexu-io/open-design · 62 tokens

book-mirror

Take any book (EPUB/PDF), produce a personalized chapter-by-chapter analysis. Each chapter is preserved in detail (The Chapter) and mirrored back to the reader's actual life (The Mirror) using brain context. The mirror observes and resonates — a friend pointing out parallels, NOT a consultant rearranging the reader's…

garrytan/gbrain · 138 tokens

miniapp

Build a tiny interactive HTML playground only when someone asks to see, play with, or step through a mechanism.

yc-software/qm · 25 tokens

eli5

Explain research, papers, or technical ideas in plain English with minimal jargon, concrete analogies, and clear takeaways. Use when the user says "ELI5 this", asks for a simple explanation of a paper or research result, wants jargon removed, or asks what something technically dense actually means.

companion-inc/feynman · 63 tokens

deck-course-module

暖纸背景 + Playfair, 左侧学习目标常驻, 含 MCQ 自测页.

nexu-io/html-anything · 25 tokens

best-practices

Searchable knowledge base of 152+ programming best practices across 30+ languages and frameworks. BM25-powered search over curated resources from industry leaders (Google, Airbnb, Uber, Mozilla, Shopify, OWASP).

dereknguyen269/programing-best-practices · 0 tokens