engineering-health

engineering-health is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from RefoundAI/lenny-skills. It costs 33 tokens per session (1,659 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to measuring and improving how a software team works, including delivery speed, technical quality, workflow delays, and technical debt—the cost of shortcuts in code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess engineering health, find delays between finishing code and releasing it, plan technical investments, and judge where AI tools may help.
Why use it?
It helps teams find what slows work down and explain why maintenance and other non-feature work are worth doing.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex.

Good fit Use it to assess engineering health, find delays between finishing code and releasing it, plan technical investments, and judge where AI tools may help.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/engineering-health
About the project

Lenny Skills is a collection of product-management and engineering workflows for Claude Code and other AI agents, covering areas such as strategy, research, planning, shipping, growth, and hiring. Each skill gives an agent specialized guidance, frameworks, checklists, or templates for product work, and the catalogue contains many of these skills.

RefoundAI/lenny-skills · 1,318 stars · on GitHub

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 RefoundAI/lenny-skills --skill engineering-health
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/RefoundAI/lenny-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 engineering-health

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/engineering-health/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/engineering-health)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/engineering-health"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/engineering-health/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for engineering-health

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/engineering-health"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/engineering-health.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 33 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,659 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00033 $0.01659
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00830
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00332
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00166

Measured 12d ago against content hash fe17dd052610, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

engineering-health 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 12d 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/engineering-health/SKILL.md · 107 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 107 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Engineering Health and Productivity

Maintain high shipping velocity by balancing technical excellence with strategic developer investments.

Help the user with engineering health and productivity using insights from 18 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

How to Help

  1. Baseline health - Use the Core 4 or DORA frameworks to establish a quantitative and qualitative starting point for team performance.
  2. Optimize workflows - Identify bottlenecks in the path from code completion to production deployment to unlock hidden velocity.
  3. Manage technical debt - Frame technical investments as business ROI to secure buy-in for non-feature work.
  4. Leverage AI tools - Integrate AI into the development lifecycle to shift engineer focus from syntax to architecture.

Core Principles

Evaluate AI by Value over Volume

Chip Huyen: "It's really hard to measure productivity. So, I do ask people to ask their managers, "Would you rather give everyone on the team very expensive coding agent subscriptions or you get an extra head count?" Almost every one, the managers will say head count."

Compare the cost and output of AI tools against the value of additional headcount rather than just looking at raw productivity gains.

Shift Focus to Architecture

Inbal S: "The user of the AI tools to develop software needs to form a different thinking. You need to start figuring out how are you using these AI tools to help you be successful. And it's no longer just the actual code writing, it's really evolving your thinking to the big picture, to the connected experience, to connected systems."

Use AI to handle manual syntax so engineers can spend more time on high level system design and product understanding.

Modernize Internal Tooling for AI

Mike Krieger: "We really rapidly became bottlenecked on other things like our merge queue. We had to completely re-architect it because so much more code was being written and so many more pull requests were being submitted. Over half of our pull requests are Claude Code generated."

Read the full file on GitHub · 107 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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.

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. 12d ago First seen · 107 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A fe17dd052610

Subscribe to this mod's changes

engineering-health is a skill published in the GitHub repository RefoundAI/lenny-skills (1,318 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 33 tokens to every session and 1,659 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.