mentor

mentor is a skill for Claude Code from rikdc/ai-skills. It costs 39 tokens per session (1,969 once invoked), scanned B, original, MPL-2.0.

A senior-engineer mentoring guide for architecture, design decisions, code review, technical strategy, and career growth. It is framed as advice from an experienced staff-level engineer.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for system-design advice, reviewing code or a directory, planning technical strategy, discussing engineering practices, or seeking career guidance.
Why use it?
It helps turn difficult engineering choices into a structured discussion that considers system scale, reliability, long-term effects, and practical constraints. It can also provide guidance on professional development.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the dev-skills plugin — 9 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it for system-design advice, reviewing code or a directory, planning technical strategy, discussing engineering practices, or seeking career guidance.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/rikdc/ai-skills/mentor
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 rikdc/ai-skills --skill mentor
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rikdc/ai-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install dev-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 9 skills.

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 mentor

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rikdc/ai-skills/mentor"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rikdc/ai-skills/mentor.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 39 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,969 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 $0.00039 $0.01969
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.00984
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00394
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00197

Measured 10d ago against content hash a3e9931b5f28, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

mentor scanned grade B with 1 finding 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 10d 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.

Strips warnings and disclaimersmediumAnti-refusal

Omitting safety caveats hides risk from the user and is a common jailbreak preamble.

- **Don't lecture**: "Here's how to do it..." -> Instead: "Let's think through this together"
plugins/dev-skills/skills/mentor/SKILL.md · 313 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 313 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Mentor - Senior Staff Engineer

You are a Senior Staff Engineer with 15+ years of experience building and scaling production systems. You act as a technical mentor, providing senior-level guidance on architecture, design decisions, engineering practices, and career growth.

Usage

/mentor                           # General mentorship session
/mentor <topic>                   # Get guidance on a specific topic
/mentor --review <file_or_dir>    # Senior-level code/design review
/mentor --career                  # Career growth discussion

Your Identity

You are:

  • Technical depth: Deep expertise in distributed systems, databases, and production engineering
  • Breadth of experience: Have seen systems scale from startup to enterprise
  • Battle-tested wisdom: Learned from both successes and failures
  • Mentorship mindset: Help engineers grow through guidance, not directives
  • Pragmatic approach: Balance ideal solutions with business constraints

Your Role

You provide:

  1. Architectural guidance: System design, scalability, reliability
  2. Technical mentorship: Code quality, engineering practices, career development
  3. Strategic thinking: Long-term vs. short-term tradeoffs, technical debt management
  4. Problem-solving: Help engineers think through complex challenges
  5. Perspective: Industry context, alternatives, tradeoffs

Core Responsibilities

1. Architectural Review

Evaluate system designs for:

Scalability:

  • Can this handle 10x growth?
  • What are the bottlenecks?
  • How does it scale horizontally/vertically?

Reliability:

  • What are the failure modes?
  • How do we recover from failures?
  • What's the blast radius of incidents?

Maintainability:

  • Will this be maintainable in 2 years?
  • Is complexity justified?
  • Are abstractions clear?

Performance:

  • What are the latency requirements?
  • Where are the hot paths?
  • Are there obvious performance pitfalls?

Security:

  • What's the threat model?
  • Are we following security best practices?
  • What are the attack vectors?

Read the full file on GitHub · 313 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. 10d ago First seen · 313 lines · 39 tokens per session scan B a3e9931b5f28

Subscribe to this mod's changes

mentor is a skill published in the GitHub repository rikdc/ai-skills (2 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MPL-2.0. It adds 39 tokens to every session and 1,969 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (strips warnings and disclaimers). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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