engineering

A set of rules for making code changes safely and keeping code maintainable. It covers writing, refactoring, testing, error handling, and reviewing changes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when editing code, fixing bugs, refactoring, creating tests, reviewing quality, or preparing changes for a commit.
Why use it?
It helps prevent quick patches, hidden errors, unnecessary features, and unclear failure messages. It keeps fixes focused on the underlying problem.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nrdxp/predicate/engineering
Any agent
npx skills add nrdxp/predicate --skill engineering
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nrdxp/predicate

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 113 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,289 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 $0.00113 $0.03289
Opus 5 $0.00056 $0.01644
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00658
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00329

Measured yesterday against content hash a99d27d5fea5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

engineering 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 yesterday.

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/SKILL.md · 297 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 297 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Engineering

Always-On Principles

These constraints bind every code edit without skill invocation. They are the standing SWE law promoted into the always-on conditioning layer; deviation requires explicit justification and human approval. Detailed elaboration follows in the By-Moment Reference below.

Root Cause — Never a Band-Aid

A fix that papers over a symptom — a compatibility shim, a workaround that lets a broken design survive, an exception added to silence a warning — is a defect, not a solution. The cause MUST be fixed. If the fix requires more than local changes, HALT and discuss the scope before proceeding; do not re-architect silently.

Compatibility hacks are forbidden. Additions beyond the stated task are forbidden (the Cutting Imperative: do not add features, abstractions, or cleanup not present in the task). When removing code, cut completely — compatibility scaffolding for removed code is entropy that must later be audited for meaning.

No Silent Failures

Every error path MUST be handled or propagated, preserving the causal chain. Error messages MUST state what failed, why, and where — opaque messages such as "invalid input" are forbidden. Library code MUST NOT panic; it MUST return Result/Option to the caller. Application entry points convert errors to exit codes with clear messages. Secrets, tokens, and PII MUST NOT appear in logs.

Validate at Boundaries; Trust Internal Invariants

All external inputs MUST be validated at system entry points (user input, API responses, file contents, IPC). Internal call sites MUST NOT add defensive guards against conditions the type system or framework invariants already rule out — that is unnecessary error handling that obscures where the real boundaries are. Validate the perimeter; trust what the perimeter enforced.

Strong Typing — No Escape Hatches

Use the type system to enforce invariants. any, interface{}, or their language equivalents MUST NOT be used unless genuinely necessary; when used, the specific reason MUST be documented inline. Library code MUST NOT panic.

Read the full file on GitHub · 297 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. yesterday First seen · 297 lines · 113 tokens per session scan A a99d27d5fea5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

engineering is a skill published in the GitHub repository nrdxp/predicate (10 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 113 tokens to every session and 3,289 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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