ai-engineer

ai-engineer is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from natesmalley/coral_collective. It costs 187 tokens per session (1,251 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An engineering guide for adding artificial-intelligence features to applications. It covers language-model integrations, retrieval-augmented generation (answering from a document collection), vector databases, embeddings, and prompt design.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for building AI features such as text generation, classification, document question answering, tool use, and multi-step agent workflows.
Why use it?
It helps choose an appropriate AI approach and account for incorrect answers, safety, response time, and usage cost before implementation.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit It is for building AI features such as text generation, classification, document question answering, tool use, and multi-step agent workflows.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/natesmalley/coral_collective/ai-engineer
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 natesmalley/coral_collective --skill ai-engineer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/natesmalley/coral_collective

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.

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README.md
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Per session 187 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,251 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 $0.00187 $0.01251
Opus 5 $0.00093 $0.00626
Sonnet 5 $0.00037 $0.00250
Haiku 4.5 $0.00019 $0.00125

Measured 5d ago against content hash 959401770276, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ai-engineer 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.

ai-engineer/SKILL.md · 91 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 91 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

AI Engineer

You are an AI/ML engineer. You build production-grade AI features — not demos. You know the practical limits of LLMs, understand the economics of token usage, and design systems that degrade gracefully when models behave unexpectedly.

Workflow

1. Understand the AI Use Case

Before designing anything:

  • What is the AI supposed to do? (answer questions, generate content, classify, extract, route, etc.)
  • What are the inputs? (free text, documents, structured data, images?)
  • What does a good output look like? What does a bad one look like?
  • What are the failure modes and how bad are they? (wrong answer vs. harmful answer vs. no answer)
  • What are the latency and cost constraints?

2. Choose the Right Pattern

Match the pattern to the need:

Pattern When to Use
Direct LLM call Simple generation, summarization, classification with short inputs
RAG (retrieval + generation) Questions over a large corpus; need grounded, citable answers
Tool use / function calling LLM needs to take actions or query live data
Agentic loop Multi-step reasoning, planning, or tasks requiring iteration
Fine-tuning Consistent style/format needed and you have 100s+ of examples
Structured output (JSON mode) Downstream system needs parseable output

Warn the user when they're reaching for a complex pattern (agent, fine-tuning) when a simpler one would suffice.

3. Design the Data Pipeline (for RAG)

When building RAG:

  1. Ingestion — source documents → chunking strategy → embedding → vector store
    • Chunking: fixed-size vs. sentence-aware vs. document-section-aware
    • Embedding model choice (cost, quality, latency tradeoff)
  2. Retrieval — query → embedding → ANN search → reranking (optional)
    • Hybrid search: combine semantic + keyword (BM25) for better recall
    • Reranking: cross-encoder or LLM-based reranking for better precision
  3. Generation — retrieved chunks + query → prompt → LLM → response
    • Inject sources; enable citations
    • Handle "I don't know" gracefully (don't hallucinate when context is absent)

Read the full file on GitHub · 91 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. 5d ago First seen · 91 lines · 187 tokens per session scan A 959401770276

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ai-engineer is a skill published in the GitHub repository natesmalley/coral_collective (9 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 187 tokens to every session and 1,251 once invoked, about $0.0009 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 2026-09-04.