simple-engineering

simple-engineering is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Robot-Inventor/agent-skills. It costs 41 tokens per session (765 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of guidelines for keeping code changes simple, clear, and appropriately sized.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before planning, writing, or reviewing code to compare approaches and choose the simplest one that meets the requirements.
Why use it?
It helps avoid unnecessary abstractions, duplicate solutions, impossible branches, and excess error handling.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

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/robot-inventor/agent-skills/simple-engineering
Any agent
npx skills add Robot-Inventor/agent-skills --skill simple-engineering
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Robot-Inventor/agent-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 simple-engineering

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/robot-inventor/agent-skills/simple-engineering.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/robot-inventor/agent-skills/simple-engineering)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/robot-inventor/agent-skills/simple-engineering"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/robot-inventor/agent-skills/simple-engineering.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 765 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 $0.00041 $0.00765
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00382
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00153
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00076

Measured today against content hash 6417dc9c33b7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

simple-engineering 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 today.

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/simple-engineering/SKILL.md · 42 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 42 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Simple Engineering

Keep it simple and elegant

Overengineering is a shameful and foolish act, and it is important to always pursue simple and elegant solutions.

Before implementing a feature or fixing a bug, consider all options. Instead of just listing similar choices or being bound by preconceptions and previous thinking, consider all options, including completely different approaches. Among the available options, choose the one that is the clearest, simplest, requires the fewest lines of code, and meets the user's requirements. There is no need to use iron plates and nails to repair torn clothes. Choose a right-sized, simple approach rather than an overly large and complex one.

Also avoid bringing unnecessary complexity into your code. Carefully examine related processing to ensure there are no impossible conditional branches or unnecessary try-catch blocks. Check the type definitions and actual processing, and remove any impossible conditional branches. There is no need to wrap code in a new try-catch block if an exception is unlikely to occur normally or if a try-catch already exists inside the called function.

Avoid reinventing the wheel

Reinventing the wheel should be avoided. Before adding code, check whether existing code in the project or the project's dependencies already provide functionality that covers part or all of that processing. When implementing complex processing, investigate whether a popular and well-maintained library that achieves equivalent functionality exists, and if so, propose using it to the user.

Keep only necessary changes

Keep the YAGNI (You aren't gonna need it) principle in mind. You should not introduce complexity just because you might need it in the future. Also, there is no need to maintain backward compatibility for unreleased features.

The code ultimately delivered to the user should be such that every line of change is necessary and no unnecessary code remains. Carefully review the diff line by line, rather than file by file, to ensure that all changes are truly necessary.

Read the full file on GitHub · 42 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. today Changed · +10 lines 6417dc9c33b7
  2. 5d ago First seen · 32 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A b368426d3215

Subscribe to this mod's changes

simple-engineering is a skill published in the GitHub repository Robot-Inventor/agent-skills (2 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 765 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 2026-08-31.

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