prompt-engineer

prompt-engineer is a skill for Claude Code from rjmurillo/ai-agents. It costs 63 tokens per session (1,559 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided tool for improving system prompts, which are the instructions that control an AI coding agent’s behaviour.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review, refine, or redesign prompts for agent workflows, tool use, and system behaviour.
Why use it?
It helps make instructions clearer, less contradictory, and better suited to the agent’s tools and limits. It also keeps a human involved in approving the proposed changes.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/. Also seen: mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the project-toolkit plugin — 113 skills, 26 commands, 33 agents, 4 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to review, refine, or redesign prompts for agent workflows, tool use, and system behaviour.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/prompt-engineer
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 rjmurillo/ai-agents --skill prompt-engineer
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 113 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 prompt-engineer

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/prompt-engineer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/prompt-engineer.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 63 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,559 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 $0.00063 $0.01559
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00779
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00312
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00156

Measured 6d ago against content hash 3d8237e4839c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

prompt-engineer 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 6d 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/prompt-engineer/SKILL.md · 179 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 179 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prompt Optimizer

Optimizes system prompts by applying research-backed prompt engineering patterns. Human-in-the-loop phases: understand, plan, propose changes, receive approval, then integrate.

Purpose and Success Criteria

A well-optimized prompt achieves:

  1. Behavioral clarity: Agent knows exactly what to do in common cases and edge cases
  2. Appropriate scope: Complex tasks get decomposition; simple tasks don't trigger overthinking
  3. Grounded changes: Every modification traces to a specific pattern with documented impact

Optimization is complete when:

  • Every change has explicit pattern attribution from the reference document
  • No section contradicts another section
  • The prompt matches its operating context (tool-use vs. conversational, token constraints)
  • Human has approved both section-level changes and full integration

Triggers

Trigger Phrase Operation
optimize this prompt Full Phase 0-4 optimization workflow
improve this system prompt Analyze and propose changes with visual cards
review my agent prompt Pattern-based review against reference
refine this prompt for better results Targeted improvement with BEFORE/AFTER
make this prompt more effective Technique selection and application

When to Use This Skill

Use when the user provides a prompt and wants it improved, refined, or reviewed for best practices.

Do NOT use for:

  • Writing prompts from scratch (different skill)
  • Prompts that are already working well and user just wants validation
  • Non-prompt content (documentation, code, etc.)

Required Resources

Before ANY analysis, read the appropriate pattern reference(s):

Single-Turn Reference (Always Read)

Read references/prompt-engineering-single-turn.md

Contains: Technique Selection Guide table, Quick Reference principles, domain-organized techniques with citations, Anti-Patterns section.

Multi-Turn Reference (Conditional)

Read the full file on GitHub · 179 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. 6d ago First seen · 179 lines · 63 tokens per session scan A 3d8237e4839c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prompt-engineer is a skill published in the GitHub repository rjmurillo/ai-agents (45 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 63 tokens to every session and 1,559 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 2026-09-03.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories