engineering-craft

engineering-craft is a skill for Claude Code from mickeyyaya/evolve-loop. It costs 40 tokens per session (1,425 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A set of rules for writing and changing production code and tests, including writing a failing test before implementation.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for guiding feature work, bug fixes, refactors, and test authoring with test-first development, repository searches, and final verification.
Why use it?
It makes completion depend on observable test or build evidence and helps avoid duplicated code, weak tests, and unverified changes.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions AGENTS.md; mentions Codex.

Not installable on its own: it reads a path above its own folder, which only exists inside its repository. The line is The craft companion to `fable` (which governs how you *operate*; this governs the code you *produce*). Content is distilled from 2025-26 measured evidence — mut.

Part of the evo plugin — 26 skills, 27 commands, 107 agents, 3 hooks shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add mickeyyaya/evolve-loop
Claude Code
/plugin install evo

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install evo, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 26 skills, 27 commands, 107 agents, 3 hooks.

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-craft

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mickeyyaya/evolve-loop/engineering-craft.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mickeyyaya/evolve-loop/engineering-craft)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mickeyyaya/evolve-loop/engineering-craft"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mickeyyaya/evolve-loop/engineering-craft.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 40 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,425 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 5.1 $0.00040 $0.01425
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00713
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00285
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00143

Measured 2d ago against content hash a4224cd3c768, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

engineering-craft 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 2d 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.

skills/engineering-craft/SKILL.md · 69 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 69 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Engineering Craft — how code gets written here

The craft companion to fable (which governs how you operate; this governs the code you produce). Content is distilled from 2025-26 measured evidence — mutation-testing studies, million-commit analyses of AI-written code, and benchmarked skill collections — not textbook restatement. Sources: knowledge-base/research/coding-craft-2026/.

Iron Laws (RIGID — no exceptions, no negotiation)

  1. No production code without a failing test first. Watch it fail, for the RIGHT reason (assertion failure on the missing behavior — not a compile error, not a typo). If code came first anyway: delete it, write the test, start over. Yes, really.
  2. Completion = machine evidence. Every task ends with a runnable check (test run, build, diff) whose real output you show. "Should work" is not a state of code.
  3. Search before you write. Before adding any function/type/helper: search for the existing one. Duplication is the measured #1 AI-code pathology (+81% duplicated blocks since 2023). Extending beats re-creating; consolidating beats both.
  4. Never weaken a test to make it pass. Tests encode intent. If a test is wrong, fix it in a commit that says so; if it's right, fix the code. Deleting/skipping/loosening assertions to go green is falsifying evidence.
  5. The diff you ship is the smallest correct one. No drive-by refactors, no unrequested "improvements", no formatting churn outside touched lines. File separate work separately.
  6. Mock only network/clock/subprocess — never your own logic.

Rationalization table (RIGID — if you think it, stop)

The thought The reality
"This is too simple to need a test" Simple code breaks too; the test costs 2 minutes and is the only proof you ran it.
"I'll add tests after it works" After-tests pass by construction and verify nothing. Red-first or start over.
"A mock is easier here" Agents over-mock measurably (mocks in 36% of agent commits touching tests vs 26% of non-agent commits). Mock only process boundaries (network, clock, subprocess) — never your own logic.
"I'll extract an interface for testability" Interfaces-for-mocking is inverted design. Consumer-side interfaces, only when ≥2 real implementations exist. (Different threshold from rule-of-three, which governs code duplication.)
"While I'm here, I'll clean this up" Scope creep buries the actual change in review noise. Note it, file it, move on.
"Coverage is high, tests are good" 85% coverage can hide a 57% mutation kill rate. Ask: would this test FAIL if the logic inverted?
"This helper probably doesn't exist yet" Search first (Iron Law 3). The codebase is bigger than your context.
"The linter/reviewer is wrong, I'll ignore it" Decline visibly with a reason, or comply. Silent disagreement re-litigates forever.

Read the full file on GitHub · 69 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 2d ago First seen · 69 lines · 40 tokens per session scan A a4224cd3c768

Subscribe to this mod's changes

engineering-craft is a skill published in the GitHub repository mickeyyaya/evolve-loop (5 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 40 tokens to every session and 1,425 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 2026-09-03.

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