dbt-incremental-strategy-audit

dbt-incremental-strategy-audit is a skill for Claude Code from yeaight7/agent-powerups. It costs 52 tokens per session (770 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A review process for dbt incremental models, which update only selected data instead of rebuilding a whole table each time. It compares the chosen strategy with repository conventions and explains the SQL that will actually run.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when reviewing or troubleshooting a model configured with incremental processing, unique keys, partitions, hooks, or unusual rebuild behavior.
Why use it?
Incremental models can silently rebuild, delete, reprocess, or duplicate data when their settings do not match their intended behavior. The audit helps identify unnecessary complexity and runtime surprises.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the data-engineering plugin — 8 skills, 4 commands, 3 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it when reviewing or troubleshooting a model configured with incremental processing, unique keys, partitions, hooks, or unusual rebuild behavior.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/yeaight7/agent-powerups/dbt-incremental-strategy-audit
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 yeaight7/agent-powerups --skill dbt-incremental-strategy-audit
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/yeaight7/agent-powerups

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install data-engineering, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 8 skills, 4 commands, 3 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 dbt-incremental-strategy-audit

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yeaight7/agent-powerups/dbt-incremental-strategy-audit/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/yeaight7/agent-powerups/dbt-incremental-strategy-audit)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/yeaight7/agent-powerups/dbt-incremental-strategy-audit"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yeaight7/agent-powerups/dbt-incremental-strategy-audit/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 dbt-incremental-strategy-audit

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/yeaight7/agent-powerups/dbt-incremental-strategy-audit"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yeaight7/agent-powerups/dbt-incremental-strategy-audit.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 770 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 $0.00052 $0.00770
Opus 5.5 $0.00021 $0.00308
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00010 $0.00154
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00077

Measured 1mo ago against content hash ac0849b05bb0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

dbt-incremental-strategy-audit 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 1mo 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.

plugins/data-engineering/skills/dbt-incremental-strategy-audit/SKILL.md · 81 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 81 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Purpose

Determine whether a dbt incremental model's chosen strategy is justified, understandable, maintainable, and consistent with repository conventions. The goal is not to praise clever implementations. Default stance: skeptical, low-risk, root-cause oriented, convention-preserving — prefer the simplest correct strategy.

When to Use

  • Reviewing a new or modified materialized='incremental' model
  • An incremental model shows confusing runtime behavior: unexpected rebuilds, deletes, or reprocessing
  • A model deviates from the repo's established incremental conventions without explanation

Inputs

  • The model SQL and its config: incremental_strategy, unique_key, partition_by/cluster_by/partitions, pre_hook/post_hook
  • Comparable incremental models in the same repo

Workflow

  1. Understand the repo pattern first. Inspect similar incremental models and how they configure their strategies:

    grep -rn "incremental_strategy" models/
    grep -rln "is_incremental()" models/
    
  2. Explain the actual runtime behavior. Compile the model and read the SQL that really runs — is_incremental() branches make the Jinja source misleading:

    dbt compile --select <model>
    # then read target/compiled/<project>/models/.../<model>.sql
    

    is_incremental() is false when the target table does not yet exist or on --full-refresh, so reason through both branches.

  3. Review the full incremental surface: materialized='incremental', incremental_strategy, is_incremental() logic, unique_key, partition_by/cluster_by/partitions, pre_hook/post_hook, delete/overwrite/merge semantics, rolling window logic, deduplication choices.

  4. Identify hidden risks:

    • hybrid full-refresh behavior hidden inside an incremental model
    • deletes outside expected scope
    • reprocessing more data than intended
    • partition/window drift and maintenance burden
    • strategy mismatch with the repo's established conventions
    • operational complexity without clear business benefit
    • confusing runtime behavior that future maintainers may misread

Read the full file on GitHub · 81 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. 1mo ago First seen · 81 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A ac0849b05bb0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

dbt-incremental-strategy-audit is a skill published in the GitHub repository yeaight7/agent-powerups (6 stars, last pushed 19d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 770 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-09-14.