programming-advisor

programming-advisor is a skill for Claude Code from rjmurillo/ai-agents. It costs 113 tokens per session (3,780 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A decision aid that checks whether a library, service, open-source project, package, or existing code already solves a development problem.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for build-versus-buy decisions, package searches, internal code searches, and comparisons of existing solutions.
Why use it?
It reduces duplicated work and the maintenance burden of building something that already exists. It searches the current project before looking at outside options.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the project-toolkit plugin — 95 skills, 26 commands, 33 agents, 4 hooks shipped together

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/rjmurillo/ai-agents/programming-advisor
Any agent
npx skills add rjmurillo/ai-agents --skill programming-advisor
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rjmurillo/ai-agents

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install project-toolkit, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 95 skills, 26 commands, 33 agents, 4 hooks.

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 programming-advisor

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/programming-advisor.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/programming-advisor)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/programming-advisor"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/programming-advisor.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 113 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,780 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00113 $0.03780
Opus 5 $0.00056 $0.01890
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00756
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00378

Measured 2d ago against content hash c921fd24a13d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

programming-advisor 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.

.claude/skills/programming-advisor/SKILL.md · 391 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 391 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Programming Advisor - "Reinventing the Wheel" Detector

Triggers

Trigger Phrase Action
"should I build X or use a library" Search internal prior-art first (Step 2a), then external solutions, provide comparison
"find existing solutions for X" Search internal prior-art first (Step 2a), then web search, categorize findings
"is there a package for X" Check existing dependencies first (Step 2a), then search npm/pip/cargo/etc
"build vs buy for X" Tactical: generate cost comparison table; Strategic (>$50K, multi-year, partner/defer options): delegate to buy-vs-build-framework
"check if X exists before building" Run full wheel detection workflow
"do we already have X" / "is there existing code for X in this repo" Search internal prior-art first (leverage/extend), then external

Core Philosophy

Before writing a single line of code, determine if the wheel already exists. Vibe coding burns tokens, time, and creates maintenance burden. Existing solutions often provide better quality, security patches, and community support.

Process

Step 1: Capture Intent

Extract from user request:

  • What: Core functionality needed
  • Why: Use case / problem being solved
  • Constraints: Language, platform, budget, licensing requirements

Step 2: Search for Existing Solutions

Search internal prior-art FIRST (leverage/extend), then external. The cheapest option is code you already have.

2a. Internal prior-art

Before any web search, check whether the capability already exists in the current repo or org:

  • grep the codebase for the capability's keywords and likely symbol names
  • if Serena is available, run a symbol search; if Forgetful memory is available, query it
  • check existing dependencies (package.json / requirements.txt / Cargo.toml / go.mod) for a library already pulled in

If an internal implementation exists, recommend Leverage (use as-is) or Extend (adapt it) before proposing a build or an external buy. Internal reuse beats both a new dependency and a rewrite.

Read the full file on GitHub · 391 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 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. 2d ago First seen · 391 lines · 113 tokens per session scan A c921fd24a13d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

programming-advisor is a skill published in the GitHub repository rjmurillo/ai-agents (45 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 113 tokens to every session and 3,780 once invoked, about $0.0006 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 2026-09-03.