maintainable-software

A set of engineering guidelines for writing code that remains easy and inexpensive to change. It focuses on simple designs, clear names, sensible boundaries, limited duplication, and tests.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when building features, refactoring, designing APIs, or making architecture decisions in any programming language.
Why use it?
It helps prevent confusing code and tangled dependencies from making future features, refactors, and fixes harder than necessary.

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/theam/facility/maintainable-software
Any agent
npx skills add theam/facility --skill maintainable-software
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/theam/facility

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 47 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 608 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 $0.00047 $0.00608
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00304
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00122
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00061

Measured 2d ago against content hash 9a591dde28df, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

maintainable-software 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.

packages/cli/templates/claude/skills/maintainable-software/SKILL.md · 68 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 68 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Maintainable software

The cost of software is the cost of changing it later. Every rule here optimizes for the next reader and the next change, not for the author.

Simplicity

  • Solve the problem in front of you. Speculative generality — the parameter nobody passes, the interface with one implementation — is debt with no loan.
  • Prefer boring constructs. Cleverness needs a comment; boring code doesn't.
  • One concept per unit: a function that needs "and" in its description is two functions.

Naming

  • Names come from the domain, not the implementation: settleInvoice, not processData2.
  • A name that needs a comment to be understood is the wrong name. Rename first, comment only for what code cannot say (constraints, why-not-the- obvious-way).
  • Inconsistent vocabulary is a bug factory: one concept, one word, repo-wide.

Boundaries and interfaces

  • Narrow interfaces, deep modules: expose the smallest surface that serves the caller; keep the complexity behind it.
  • Dependencies point one way. A module that reaches into its consumers — or into globals — can't be tested or replaced.
  • Side effects live at the edges; the core is data in, data out. If a function both computes and writes, split it.

Duplication

  • Duplicate shape is fine; duplicate concept is not. Two functions that look alike but change for different reasons should stay apart; one business rule written twice will diverge and one copy will be wrong.
  • Extract on the second real occurrence of the same concept, with a domain name. Extracting on resemblance creates the worst abstraction: the shared helper full of flags.

Errors

  • Make failure explicit at the boundary: validate input where it enters, fail with a message the caller can act on, never swallow.
  • Impossible states should be unrepresentable (types, schemas, constraints) rather than checked everywhere.

Tests

  • Tests protect behavior, not implementation. A test that breaks on a rename is friction; a behavior change that breaks no test is a hole.
  • Test the boundary you'd be afraid to change. If a bug got through, the first fix is the test that would have caught it.

Read the full file on GitHub · 68 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 · 68 lines · 47 tokens per session scan A 9a591dde28df

Subscribe to this mod's changes

maintainable-software is a skill published in the GitHub repository theam/facility (43 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 47 tokens to every session and 608 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 2026-08-30.

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