eng-holistic-systems

eng-holistic-systems is a skill for Claude Code from tjboudreaux/cc-plugin-engineering-excellence. It costs 34 tokens per session (385 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A software-engineering guide for understanding a change across the whole system before editing code. It maps connected components, constraints, data flow, and possible failure points.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for changes that span clients, services, workers, smart contracts, deployments, or other connected parts of an application.
Why use it?
It helps prevent fixes in one layer from breaking another layer or overlooking important operational limits.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the engineering-excellence plugin — 13 skills, 4 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it for changes that span clients, services, workers, smart contracts, deployments, or other connected parts of an application.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tjboudreaux/cc-plugin-engineering-excellence/eng-holistic-systems
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 tjboudreaux/cc-plugin-engineering-excellence --skill eng-holistic-systems
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tjboudreaux/cc-plugin-engineering-excellence

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install engineering-excellence, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 skills, 4 agents.

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 eng-holistic-systems

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-plugin-engineering-excellence/eng-holistic-systems/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-plugin-engineering-excellence/eng-holistic-systems)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-plugin-engineering-excellence/eng-holistic-systems"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-plugin-engineering-excellence/eng-holistic-systems/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 eng-holistic-systems

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-plugin-engineering-excellence/eng-holistic-systems"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-plugin-engineering-excellence/eng-holistic-systems.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 385 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 $0.00034 $0.00385
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00192
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00077
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00038

Measured 10d ago against content hash 5c9ae3f753fc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

eng-holistic-systems 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/eng-holistic-systems/SKILL.md · 36 lines

What it actually says

Holistic Systems Thinking

Intent

  • Understand the true user goal, success metrics, and non-negotiable constraints.
  • Trace data/control flow across clients, services, contracts, and on-chain/off-chain boundaries.
  • Surface hidden couplings, scalability ceilings, and rollback requirements early.

Inputs to Gather

  1. Problem statement in your own words plus measurable success criteria.
  2. Existing architecture sketches (runtime, deployment, data lifecycle) and ownership boundaries.
  3. Operational constraints: latency/throughput budgets, privacy rules, platform limitations, on-chain gas caps, store policies, etc.
  4. Known risks: single points of failure, stale assumptions, migrations in flight.

Workflow

  1. Map the ecosystem
    • List upstream/downstream systems, contracts, and user touchpoints affected.
    • Identify invariants that must hold and where they can break.
  2. Reason about change scope
    • Partition work into independently testable slices with explicit integration seams.
    • Decide where to place new logic (client/server/worker/contract) based on latency, trust, and deployability.
  3. Plan resiliency
    • Define failure detection signals, graceful degradation, and rollback/feature-flag hooks.
    • Highlight areas needing schema/version negotiation.
  4. Record decisions for execution
    • Capture the chosen approach, tradeoffs, and open questions inside the ticket/PR description before implementation.

Verification

  • Confirm each requirement maps to at least one planned change and validation step.
  • Share the plan with a peer or stakeholder; ensure assumptions and risks are acknowledged.
  • Revisit this skill after implementation planning to see if new dependencies appeared; update the plan accordingly.
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 · 36 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 5c9ae3f753fc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

eng-holistic-systems is a skill published in the GitHub repository tjboudreaux/cc-plugin-engineering-excellence (4 stars, last pushed 7mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 385 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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