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.
npx skills add rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineer --skill refactor-seamsgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineerWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineer/refactor-seams)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineer/refactor-seams"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineer/refactor-seams.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00108 | $0.01865 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00054 | $0.00932 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00022 | $0.00373 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00186 |
Grade A, and why
refactor-seams 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 8d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 143 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Refactor seams
Changing the shape of something without stopping it.
Why this exists
The default plan for code that has become hard to change is a rewrite on a branch. It is almost always the wrong plan, and it fails the same way every time: the branch diverges, the main line keeps moving, the merge becomes impossible, and the work is abandoned after months. Everyone involved knew this would happen and did it anyway, because the alternative looked slower.
The alternative genuinely is slower per step, and it finishes. Incremental restructuring behind a seam, with the system releasable at every point, converts an all-or-nothing bet into a series of small safe changes — any one of which can be the last one if priorities shift.
For an FDE this matters twice over. You may not be here long enough to finish a rewrite, and a half-finished rewrite is worse than either state. Every incremental step you ship is value that survives your departure.
When this applies
- Extracting from a monolith
- Replacing a component incrementally
- A refactor too large for one change
- Someone proposes a rewrite
- Code must change but isn't safely changeable
When it doesn't
- The change fits in one safe diff — that's
safe-change - The component is genuinely small and well covered
- Nothing is being restructured, only behavior added
Prerequisites
- Locate the workspace:
FDE_WORKSPACE, else the charter Location, else.fde/, else../<repo>-fde/ .fde/06-blast-radius-*.md— you need to know every callercharacterization-testsfirst. Restructuring untested code is the single riskiest thing in this portfolio. The tests are what make the refactor verifiable as behavior-preserving..fde/adr/— the target shape should be a recorded decision
Procedure
1. Establish the seam
A seam is where you can change behavior without editing the thing you're changing. Find it before planning anything.
Candidates, in rough order of preference:
- An existing interface with the callers already going through it — ideal, nothing to introduce
- A constructor or factory where the implementation is chosen
- A configuration or flag selecting between paths
- A module or package boundary with a narrow public surface
- A network boundary — the coarsest and often the most practical for extraction
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.
- 8d ago First seen · 143 lines · 108 tokens per session scan A cf0c0bc09847
refactor-seams is a skill published in the GitHub repository rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineer (6 stars, last pushed 21d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 108 tokens to every session and 1,865 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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