codebase-archaeologist

Guidance for understanding an unfamiliar codebase when Codebase Memory is available. A codebase is a project's source code, and architecture describes how its major parts fit together.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when debugging unfamiliar code, explaining behaviour, tracing data flows, or examining component relationships and design decisions.
Why use it?
It helps developers find where code belongs and understand system behaviour without exploring the project blindly.

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/psreek-ai/codebase-mooc/codebase-archaeologist
Any agent
npx skills add psreek-ai/codebase-mooc --skill codebase-archaeologist
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/psreek-ai/codebase-mooc

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 109 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 345 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin unknown 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 $0.00109 $0.00345
Opus 5 $0.00055 $0.00172
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00069
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00034

Measured yesterday against content hash 9c16c91946fb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

codebase-archaeologist 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/codebase-archaeologist/SKILL.md · 42 lines

The source is not reproduced here

No licence file

A repository with no LICENSE is all rights reserved by default, so the body is not copied here. The metadata, the measurements and the link are.

Read it on GitHub

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 · 42 lines · 109 tokens per session scan A 9c16c91946fb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

codebase-archaeologist is a skill published in the GitHub repository psreek-ai/codebase-mooc (1 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), with no licence file. It adds 109 tokens to every session and 345 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 2026-08-31.

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