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 agentmods add skills/phelan164/codex-howto/engineering-loopnpx skills add Phelan164/codex-howto --skill engineering-loopgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Phelan164/codex-howtoWhat 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 | $0.00061 | $0.00733 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00030 | $0.00367 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00012 | $0.00147 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00006 | $0.00073 |
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 2d 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 — 73 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Engineering Loop
Own the change from a verified starting point to a reviewed result. Use one agent and this skill alone unless a specialist changes a material decision.
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.
- Identify repository-native validation and run the smallest safe baseline that separates pre-existing failures from task regressions.
For a long, cross-stack, or high-risk change, use the templates and failure rules in references/loop-contract.md. When a task is expected to need repeated autonomous iterations or has an explicit retry, time, token, or cost limit, also use references/loop-policy.md. When a defect is intermittent, performance-related, difficult to reproduce, or resists the first evidence-driven pass, use references/hard-debugging.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.
- Pause before expanding into an unplanned subsystem, public contract, migration, or external system. Record why the original scope is insufficient and obtain any authority the expansion requires.
- Classify failures as product, test, environment, or assumption failures; fix the cause and rerun the affected check.
- Run repository-required broader checks after focused checks pass.
- 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.
Keep a compact ledger of confirmed facts, changed files, commands, outcomes, and the next decision. Return concise diagnostics instead of full logs.
What ships with it
4 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.
- 2d 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 (3 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 61 tokens to every session and 733 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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