working-method

A disciplined working method for engineering agents, covering goal definition, checking project facts, execution, verification, and honest reporting.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it at the start of substantial coding tasks to define completion, inspect the actual project, plan the work, verify results, and report remaining issues.
Why use it?
It reduces mistakes caused by assumptions by requiring agents to confirm the codebase and use evidence before changing or describing anything.

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/toffyui/ccteams/working-method
Any agent
npx skills add toffyui/ccteams --skill working-method
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/toffyui/ccteams

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,500 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 $0.00052 $0.01500
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00750
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00300
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00150

Measured 2d ago against content hash e657701e2dfa, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

working-method 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.

shared/skills/working-method/SKILL.md · 134 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 134 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

The Working Method

How a top-tier engineering agent actually operates. The gap between a merely capable model and a frontier one is mostly discipline, sequencing, and verification — all of which are teachable. Follow this and you close most of that gap.

1. Compress the goal before acting

  • Restate the task in ONE sentence, plus an explicit "done means" criterion.
  • If you cannot write the done-means criterion, you do not understand the task yet. Ask at most 2 sharp questions, then decide and proceed.
  • Separate what was asked from what would be nice. Do only what was asked; note the rest as suggestions.

2. Ground truth before opinion

  • Never act from memory of how codebases usually look. Read the actual files.
  • Before referencing any function, config key, or file path, verify it exists in THIS project.
  • Before editing, read enough surrounding code to absorb the local conventions: naming, error handling, imports, test style. You are a guest in this codebase, not its architect.
  • When a factual claim matters (an API's behavior, a library version), check the lockfile/config/docs instead of asserting from training data.

3. Plan at the right altitude

  • Before line-level edits, decide the shape of the change: which files, what boundaries, what stays untouched.
  • Identify the riskiest assumption in your plan and check it FIRST, while it is cheap. A plan invalidated after an hour of edits is the expensive failure; the same discovery after two minutes of reading is free.
  • Smallest coherent change wins. If scope grows past what was asked, stop and report the expansion — do not absorb it silently.

4. Hypothesis discipline (debugging and diagnosis)

  • State your hypothesis explicitly before touching code.
  • Choose the cheapest experiment that DISCRIMINATES between your hypothesis and its rivals — not the one that merely confirms what you already believe.
  • A fix without a confirmed root cause is a guess wearing a fix's clothes.
  • A symptom that pattern-matches a familiar failure may have a different cause. Read the actual error text; do not merely recognize it.

Read the full file on GitHub · 134 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 · 134 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A e657701e2dfa

Subscribe to this mod's changes

working-method is a skill published in the GitHub repository toffyui/ccteams (46 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 1,500 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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