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.
npx skills add Phelan164/codex-howto --skill engineering-loopgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Phelan164/codex-howtoWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/phelan164/codex-howto/engineering-loop)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/phelan164/codex-howto/engineering-loop"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/phelan164/codex-howto/engineering-loop/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/phelan164/codex-howto/engineering-loop"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/phelan164/codex-howto/engineering-loop.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00047 | $0.00913 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00019 | $0.00365 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00183 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00091 |
Grade A, and why
engineering-loop 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 23d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 86 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Engineering Loop
Deliver a verified change with minimal supervision and proportionate checking. Start with one agent. Delegate only when authorized and independent work or review coverage justifies the overhead. Follow applicable repository and team requirements; this skill adds no ticketing or mandatory-agent process.
Establish the baseline
- Read applicable
AGENTS.mdfiles and repository documentation. - Record the requested behavior, constraints, and observable done conditions.
- Inspect the branch and working tree; preserve unrelated user-owned changes.
- Before changing shared behavior, trace affected callers, consumers, and tests using targeted search or an available code graph. Expand along relevant paths.
- Identify repository-native validation and run the smallest safe baseline that separates pre-existing failures from task regressions.
Resolve routine choices from evidence. Ask only for missing authority or a material decision: ambiguous acceptance, incompatible public behavior, or destructive/data-changing side effects not already authorized. Continue independent authorized work while awaiting an answer.
Load only the needed reference:
- Long, cross-stack, or high-risk work: loop-contract.md.
- Repeated iterations or explicit budgets: loop-policy.md.
- Intermittent, performance, or unresolved defects: hard-debugging.md.
- Requested or risk-justified separate review: independent-review.md.
Run the loop
- Reproduce the defect, or capture the current behavior for a feature.
- Choose the smallest coherent change and the evidence that will prove it.
- Add a failing regression test first when practical.
- Implement one bounded change and run the narrowest relevant check.
- If an unplanned path is necessary, record why and update the scope and checks.
- Classify failures as product, test, environment, assumption, or external blocker. Do not change product code to mask environment failures.
- Run affected consumer checks and repository-required broader checks.
- Review the complete diff first for task-contract compliance, then for code quality, regressions, security, and maintainability.
- Fix consequential findings and rerun checks affected by those fixes.
What ships with it
6 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.
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.
- 23d ago Changed · -5 lines · -14 tokens per session ecd7dc058025
- 1mo ago Changed · +3 lines cbe6b203ed29
- 1mo ago Changed · +15 lines 3f072230bfc1
- 1mo ago First seen · 73 lines · 61 tokens per session scan A c67a37ae802c
engineering-loop is a skill published in the GitHub repository Phelan164/codex-howto (14 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 47 tokens to every session and 913 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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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