reverse-engineering-requirements

reverse-engineering-requirements is a skill for Claude Code from njt/powerups-requirements. It costs 101 tokens per session (3,080 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A process for extracting documented requirements from an existing codebase through repeated review. It separates intended behavior from implementation details, dead code, workarounds, and accidental complexity.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when inheriting undocumented software, reimplementing a system, migrating to another technology, or asking what the current code really does.
Why use it?
It helps teams understand what a system actually needs to do before rebuilding or migrating it, while leaving uncertain interpretations for human confirmation.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Part of the powerups-requirements plugin — 3 skills, 1 agent shipped together

Good fit Use it when inheriting undocumented software, reimplementing a system, migrating to another technology, or asking what the current code really does.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/njt/powerups-requirements/reverse-engineering-requirements
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 njt/powerups-requirements --skill reverse-engineering-requirements
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/njt/powerups-requirements

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install powerups-requirements, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills, 1 agent.

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 reverse-engineering-requirements

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/njt/powerups-requirements/reverse-engineering-requirements/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/njt/powerups-requirements/reverse-engineering-requirements)
Your own site
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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 reverse-engineering-requirements

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/njt/powerups-requirements/reverse-engineering-requirements"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/njt/powerups-requirements/reverse-engineering-requirements.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 101 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,080 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 $0.00101 $0.03080
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.01540
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00616
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00308

Measured 9d ago against content hash c16827f7ccc0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

reverse-engineering-requirements 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/reverse-engineering-requirements/SKILL.md · 286 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 286 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Reverse-Engineering Requirements

Purpose

Extract what an existing system actually does — and what it should do in a reimplementation — by reading source code, iteratively reviewing with fresh-eyes subagents, and separating genuine requirements from implementation accidents.

This is harder than greenfield elicitation because the code contains everything: requirements, design decisions, style choices, workarounds, dead code, and accidental complexity from previous technology constraints. Your job is to separate signal from noise.

Role Division

You do: Orchestrate the process. Dispatch subagents. Facilitate discussion between the human and the review findings. Draft and refine the requirements doc. Identify non-goals.

The human does: Provide context about the system's purpose and users. Confirm or reject your interpretations. Identify which behaviours are intentional vs accidental. Make priority calls.

Subagents do: Read source code with fresh eyes. Compare spec against code. Find omissions, inaccuracies, and things that don't belong. They bring no prior assumptions — that's their value.

You never: Assume every behaviour in the code is a requirement. Treat implementation details as requirements. Skip the human's judgment on what matters.

What Belongs Where

The same filtering from gathering-requirements applies, but with an extra category that dominates in reverse-engineering work:

Requirement = behaviour observable from outside. "Display client name in task list." Decision = how the system achieves it. "Store config at ~/.cu/config.json." Style = formatting/presentation. "Truncate names at 45 characters." Non-Goal = something present in the old system that we explicitly don't want. "Font size adjustment buttons (unnecessary on web — the old WinForms app couldn't resize or rescale)."

The litmus test for non-goals: "Is this behaviour in the old code because of a genuine user need, or because of a constraint that no longer exists?" If the constraint is gone, the behaviour is a non-goal candidate. Confirm with the human.

Read the full file on GitHub · 286 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 · 286 lines · 101 tokens per session scan A c16827f7ccc0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

reverse-engineering-requirements is a skill published in the GitHub repository njt/powerups-requirements (11 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 101 tokens to every session and 3,080 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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