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 skillmds/skillmd --skill brooks-lintgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/skillmds/skillmdWrote 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/skillmds/skillmd/brooks-lint)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/skillmds/skillmd/brooks-lint"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/skillmds/skillmd/brooks-lint/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/skillmds/skillmd/brooks-lint"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/skillmds/skillmd/brooks-lint.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" 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 | $0.00026 | $0.01480 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00592 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00296 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00003 | $0.00148 |
Grade A, and why
brooks-lint 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 1mo 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 — 138 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Brooks Lint
Overview
Brooks Lint is a Claude Code skill that reviews your code through the lens of 12 classic software engineering books. Instead of checking style rules, it asks: "What would the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer, Clean Code, and Designing Data-Intensive Applications say about this code?"
It synthesizes the principles from landmark engineering books into actionable, structured feedback — catching design smells, tight coupling, missing abstractions, and architectural risks that linters and AI tools typically miss.
Named after Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month — because the hardest bugs are conceptual, not syntactic.
The 12 Books
| Book | Key Principles Applied |
|---|---|
| The Pragmatic Programmer | DRY, orthogonality, tracer bullets |
| Clean Code | Naming, function size, comment clarity |
| The Mythical Man-Month | Conceptual integrity, second-system effect |
| Designing Data-Intensive Applications | Data consistency, fault tolerance, scalability |
| A Philosophy of Software Design | Deep modules, information hiding, complexity |
| Refactoring | Code smells, extract method, encapsulation |
| Working Effectively with Legacy Code | Seams, characterization tests, dependency breaking |
| Domain-Driven Design | Ubiquitous language, bounded contexts, aggregates |
| Release It! | Stability patterns, timeouts, bulkheads, circuit breakers |
| Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs | Abstraction, recursion, metalinguistic abstraction |
| The Art of UNIX Programming | Modularity, composability, rule of least surprise |
| Extreme Programming Explained | YAGNI, simple design, collective ownership |
When to Use This Skill
- Use when you want architectural feedback beyond what linters provide
- Use before major refactors to identify structural debt
- Use when reviewing code that "works but feels wrong"
- Use when onboarding to a codebase to quickly map risk areas
- Use for design reviews before starting a new module or service
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.
- 1mo ago First seen · 138 lines · 26 tokens per session scan A c375cfc1d418
brooks-lint is a skill published in the GitHub repository skillmds/skillmd (143 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 26 tokens to every session and 1,480 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-09-19.
brooks-lint compared with skills from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| brooks-lintskillmds/skillmd | Skill | 143 | 4d ago | MIT | A | 26 | Claude Code |
| code-quality-principlesathola/claude-night-market | Skill | 348 | today | MIT | A | 38 | Claude Code |
| plugin-qualityzhinjs/zhin | Skill | 137 | today | MIT | A | 49 | Claude Code, Codex |
| improve-codebase-architectureseaworld008/Commonly-used-high-value-skills | Skill | 74 | 3d ago | MIT | A | 22 | Claude Code, Codex |
| refactoring-workflowpersonamanagmentlayer/pcl | Skill | 44 | 12d ago | Apache-2.0 | A | 83 | Claude Code |
| coderabbit-reviewSynkraAI/aiox-core | Skill | 3.1k | today | none | A | 50 | Claude Code |
| aiox-qaSynkraAI/aiox-core | Skill | 3.1k | today | none | A | 35 | Codex |