performance

A method for finding and reducing software slowdowns by measuring where time, memory, or other resources are being used.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate slow queries, repeated database access, network calls, rendering, memory growth, caching, latency, or throughput.
Why use it?
It replaces guesses about performance problems with evidence about the actual bottleneck.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/soden46/engineer-flow/performance
Any agent
npx skills add soden46/engineer-flow --skill performance
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/soden46/engineer-flow

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 35 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 473 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 $0.00035 $0.00473
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00236
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00095
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00047

Measured 2d ago against content hash c0015bc52711, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

performance 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.

skills/engineer-flow/core/performance/SKILL.md · 126 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 126 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Performance

Use this skill when work involves latency, throughput, resource usage, query efficiency, rendering cost, memory pressure, or scaling bottlenecks.

This skill is technology agnostic.

Measure First

Do not optimize solely from intuition.

Identify:

  • the slow operation
  • current baseline
  • dominant cost
  • expected improvement
  • acceptable tradeoffs

Use measurements appropriate to the system.

Common Bottlenecks

Investigate relevant:

  • repeated database queries
  • N+1 access
  • unnecessary network calls
  • repeated computation
  • inefficient algorithms
  • excessive serialization
  • large payloads
  • blocking I/O
  • unnecessary rendering
  • memory growth
  • contention
  • cache misses
  • excessive file operations

Do not assume the database is always the bottleneck.

Database Performance

Consider:

  • query count
  • query plans
  • indexes
  • join behavior
  • selected columns
  • pagination
  • batch operations
  • eager/bulk loading
  • connection usage

Add indexes based on actual query patterns.

Caching

Cache when:

  • computation or retrieval is meaningfully expensive
  • reuse is likely
  • consistency requirements are understood

Define:

  • cache key
  • lifetime
  • invalidation
  • ownership
  • failure behavior

Do not add caching merely to hide an inefficient design without understanding correctness implications.

Memory

Avoid loading unbounded datasets into memory.

Prefer:

  • streaming
  • chunking
  • pagination
  • iterators
  • bounded batches

when processing large data.

Concurrency

Parallelism can improve throughput but may increase:

  • contention
  • memory usage
  • rate-limit pressure
  • database load
  • ordering complexity

Use bounded concurrency.

Verification

Compare before and after.

Verify:

  • functional behavior remains correct
  • measured metric improves
  • resource usage remains acceptable
  • no significant regression is introduced elsewhere

Performance work without measurement should be treated as a hypothesis, not a proven optimization.

Framework Adaptation

Read the full file on GitHub · 126 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. 2d ago First seen · 126 lines · 35 tokens per session scan A c0015bc52711

Subscribe to this mod's changes

performance is a skill published in the GitHub repository soden46/engineer-flow (3 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 35 tokens to every session and 473 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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