dependency-hygiene

dependency-hygiene is a skill for Claude Code from the-open-agent/oss-skills. It costs 101 tokens per session (1,922 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A set of practices for keeping a project's third-party packages few, maintained, safe, and easy to remove.

In plain words
What is it for?
It supports decisions about adding packages, auditing dependency trees, choosing versions, and configuring automated update tools such as Dependabot or Renovate.
Why use it?
It helps prevent unnecessary code, security risks, license problems, version conflicts, and difficult future upgrades.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the oss-skills plugin — 18 skills shipped together

Good fit It supports decisions about adding packages, auditing dependency trees, choosing versions, and configuring automated update tools such as Dependabot or Renovate.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/dependency-hygiene
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 the-open-agent/oss-skills --skill dependency-hygiene
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/the-open-agent/oss-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install oss-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 18 skills.

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 dependency-hygiene

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/dependency-hygiene/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/dependency-hygiene)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/dependency-hygiene"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/dependency-hygiene/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 dependency-hygiene

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/dependency-hygiene"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/dependency-hygiene.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 101 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,922 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.
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 $0.00101 $0.01922
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.00961
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00384
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00192

Measured 10d ago against content hash 604a107c2057, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

dependency-hygiene 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 10d 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/dependency-hygiene/SKILL.md · 181 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 181 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Dependency Hygiene

Every dependency is code you did not write, cannot review continuously, and are nonetheless responsible for. For a library, each one is also imposed on every user downstream — a cost you spend on their behalf without asking.

Should you add it?

Run this before every npm install:

  1. How much of it will you use? One function from a 40-file package is usually a copy (with attribution and license compliance — see license-and-legal), not a dependency.
  2. Could the standard library do it? Modern stdlibs cover far more than they did when most "small utility" packages were written.
  3. Is it maintained? Last release, open issue age, bus factor, response time on recent issues. A package with one maintainer and no release in three years is a future migration you have scheduled without noticing.
  4. What does it pull in? Check the transitive tree, not the direct entry.
  5. What is its license? Especially transitively.
  6. Does it run code at install time? postinstall, setup.py, build.rs.
  7. How hard is removal? If it is woven through your public API types, you have adopted its release cadence permanently.
npm view <pkg> dependencies maintainers time.modified
npx howfat <pkg>                   # true install size incl. transitives
npm ls --all <pkg>                 # who pulls this in
cargo tree -i <crate>              # reverse dependency tree
pipdeptree -r -p <pkg>

Library authors: the bar is much higher than for applications. A dependency in a library is a dependency in every consumer's tree, a potential version conflict, and a row in their security scanner's report. Many successful libraries advertise zero runtime dependencies, and that is a feature users select on.

Ranges vs pinning

The rule that resolves most confusion:

Applications Libraries
Manifest Ranges are fine Wide ranges, e.g. ^1.2.0
Lockfile Commit it Commit it (for CI reproducibility)
Install in CI npm ci / --locked npm ci, plus a job testing latest deps

Read the full file on GitHub · 181 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. 10d ago First seen · 181 lines · 101 tokens per session scan A 604a107c2057

Subscribe to this mod's changes

dependency-hygiene is a skill published in the GitHub repository the-open-agent/oss-skills (5 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 101 tokens to every session and 1,922 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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