boyscout

boyscout is a skill for Claude Code from mikestangdevs/craft-skills. It costs 107 tokens per session (1,154 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A small-cleanup rule for changes to existing files: leave nearby code slightly clearer without expanding the task into a large refactor.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for renaming unclear variables, removing dead lines, clarifying conditions, or making similarly small improvements alongside an edit.
Why use it?
It prevents both neglecting obvious local problems and turning a focused change into an unrelated rewrite.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the craft-skills plugin — 17 skills shipped together

Good fit It is for renaming unclear variables, removing dead lines, clarifying conditions, or making similarly small improvements alongside an edit.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/boyscout
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 mikestangdevs/craft-skills --skill boyscout
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mikestangdevs/craft-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install craft-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 17 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 boyscout

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/boyscout/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/boyscout)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/boyscout"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/boyscout/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 boyscout

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/boyscout"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/boyscout.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 107 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,154 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 $0.00107 $0.01154
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.00577
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00231
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00115

Measured 9d ago against content hash eec4d72299ef, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

boyscout 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 9d 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/craft/boyscout/SKILL.md · 81 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 81 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Boy Scout

The failure mode this fixes

Two opposite failures rot codebases. One: never cleaning up, so entropy compounds until the file is a no-go zone. The other: a "quick change" balloons into a 600-line refactor that's impossible to review and ships three bugs. Agents swing wildly between both — either touching nothing around the change or rewriting the whole file uninvited.

The Boy Scout Rule threads the needle: leave the code a little better than you found it. Small, bounded, in-scope, separate from the behavior change. This skill enforces the little — disciplined cleanup, not a crusade.

When to Use This Skill

  • You're editing an existing file to make a change (any non-trivial edit)
  • You notice something adjacent that's mildly wrong (a vague name, a dead line, a muddy condition)
  • A reviewer asked "while you're in there, can you also..."

Don't use when: the file is brand new (nothing to clean), or the cleanup is large enough to deserve its own PR. If cleanup would exceed roughly a third of the size of your actual change, stop and file it as separate work — the cleanup is the tip, not the meal. For a deliberate dead-code sweep across a module, use delete-this instead — this skill is only for small, opportunistic, in-scope cleanup riding along with a change you're already making.

Instructions

1. Make your real change first

Do the thing you came to do. Get it working and verified. The cleanup is a tip, not the meal — never let it block or bloat the actual change.

2. Scan only what you touched (the blast radius)

Look at the functions and lines your change touched, plus their immediate neighbors. Do not scan the whole file for sins — that's how scope explodes. The rule applies to the campsite you used, not the whole forest.

3. Pick improvements that pass the cheapness test

An improvement qualifies only if it is all of:

  • Small — a name, a deleted dead line, one extracted helper, a clarified boolean, a fixed comment
  • Safe — provably behavior-preserving (no logic change)
  • In-scope — adjacent to your change, in code you already had to understand
  • Self-evident in review — a reviewer sees instantly why it's better

Read the full file on GitHub · 81 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. 9d ago First seen · 81 lines · 107 tokens per session scan A eec4d72299ef

Subscribe to this mod's changes

boyscout is a skill published in the GitHub repository mikestangdevs/craft-skills (4 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 107 tokens to every session and 1,154 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 2026-08-31.

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