iterative-file-editing

iterative-file-editing is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from microsoft/cat-agent-skills. It costs 106 tokens per session (290 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for enforcing project-specific coding and architecture rules. It stores those rules in a constitution file and validates the file's structure automatically.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps initialize, view, edit, and validate a project's coding, architecture, security, and best-practice rules.
Why use it?
It gives coding agents a shared set of project standards, reducing inconsistent code and repeated explanations about how the project should be changed.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex ✓ vendor

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit It helps initialize, view, edit, and validate a project's coding, architecture, security, and best-practice rules.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/iterative-file-editing
About the project

microsoft/cat-agent-skills is a static website that catalogs reusable instruction sets and related packages for AI agents. People use it to search, filter, rate, and download skills for Cowork, Copilot Studio, and Scout, along with Copilot plugins and Scout automations. The catalogue entries are the skills, instructions, plugins, and settings displayed by the site.

microsoft/cat-agent-skills · 64 stars · on GitHub

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 microsoft/cat-agent-skills --skill iterative-file-editing
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/cat-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 iterative-file-editing

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/iterative-file-editing.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/iterative-file-editing)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/iterative-file-editing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/iterative-file-editing.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 106 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 290 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00106 $0.00290
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.00145
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00058
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00029

Measured 8d ago against content hash d6affe709fb9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

iterative-file-editing 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 8d 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.

submissions/iterative-file-editing/SKILL.md · 29 lines

What it actually says

When you send the user an updated version of a file you've already sent them, give it a new filename with an incremented version number — report_v2.docx, report_v3.docx, and so on. If you reuse the filename the user has already received, the delivery event won't fire and they'll never get the update, even though the file changed. A filename they haven't seen before is what triggers the send.

So annotate each iteration with the next version number, and the user receives every version as its own attachment.

Example

report_v1.docx   first version sent to the user
report_v2.docx   the same file after "make the timeline more detailed"
report_v3.docx   after "also add a budget table"
Files

What ships with it

2 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. 8d ago First seen · 29 lines · 106 tokens per session scan A d6affe709fb9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

iterative-file-editing is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/cat-agent-skills (64 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 106 tokens to every session and 290 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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