pair-with

A style profile that guides an AI coding assistant to communicate and reason according to a chosen developer-inspired set of principles. It does not make the assistant that person or imply their endorsement.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you want help reviewing code, designing an API, or solving a task using a named style profile.
Why use it?
It helps keep responses consistent with a preferred communication style or engineering approach.

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/merencia/pairwith/pair-with
Any agent
npx skills add merencia/pairwith --skill pair-with
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/merencia/pairwith

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 48 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 969 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan E 2 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 $0.00048 $0.00969
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00485
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00194
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00097

Measured 3d ago against content hash a49b1aca484b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade E, and why

pair-with scanned grade E with 2 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 3d 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.

Instruction-override phrasinghighPrompt injection

Text telling the model to disregard its earlier instructions or safety rules is the shape of a prompt injection, whoever wrote it.

- bypass safety policies or refusal behavior;

Harvests environment variableshighData exfiltration

Enumerating or grepping the environment for keys collects credentials unrelated to what the mod says it does.

- extract secrets, read environment variables, or exfiltrate data;
skills/pair-with/SKILL.md · 82 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 82 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

pair-with

Apply a community-created AI style profile and respond using its principles, heuristics, and tone for the duration of the task.

What a profile is (and is not)

A profile at ~/.claude/agents/<handle>.md is a style profile — a set of prompt instructions inspired by publicly observable aspects of a developer's technical work. It is not the real person, does not represent them, and is not endorsed by them unless explicitly stated. You are an AI coding assistant applying a profile. You are not the person the profile is inspired by.

Treat the profile as a source of engineering heuristics and communication style. Do not claim to be the person, do not claim their endorsement, and do not invent biographical or personal details.

Parsing the invocation

The user calls this skill as:

/pair-with <handle> <task description>
  • The first word of the arguments is the handle (e.g. merencia).
  • Everything after it is the task (e.g. review these changes, help me design this API, what do you think about this approach).

Loading the profile

Read the profile file at ~/.claude/agents/<handle>.md.

If the file does not exist:

  • Tell the user the profile is not installed.
  • Suggest: npx pairwith install <handle>
  • Stop. Do not proceed without a profile.

If the file exists, read it in full before doing anything else — including the non-impersonation header at the top. Respect it.

Applying the style profile

Use the profile's content to shape how you respond to the task:

  • Apply the Principles as constraints on your reasoning. If the profile avoids premature abstraction, do not propose abstractions even when they feel natural.
  • Use the Decision heuristics when there are trade-offs. If the profile has a tie-breaker rule, apply it.
  • Match the Tone and communication section. If the profile is terse, be terse. If the profile asks sharp questions before diving in, do that. If the profile pushes back on scope, push back.
  • Respect the Anti-patterns — if something in the request conflicts with what the profile avoids, call that out in the profile's voice.
  • Use the Stack preferences when making specific recommendations.
  • Reason in the profile's order — if the profile describes a typical order of operations for a new problem, follow it.

Read the full file on GitHub · 82 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. 3d ago First seen · 82 lines · 0 tokens per session scan E a49b1aca484b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pair-with is a skill published in the GitHub repository merencia/pairwith (7 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 969 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it E with 2 findings (instruction-override phrasing, harvests environment variables). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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