ai-first-engineering

An engineering approach for teams where AI agents write much of the software.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing agent-friendly systems with explicit boundaries, stable contracts, typed interfaces, deterministic tests, regression coverage, and integration checks.
Why use it?
It shifts attention from typing speed and style to clear planning, measurable tests, system behaviour, security, data integrity, and safe releases.

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/zhmxiaowo/opencode-simple/ai-first-engineering
Any agent
npx skills add zhmxiaowo/opencode-simple --skill ai-first-engineering
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/zhmxiaowo/opencode-simple

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 21 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 258 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 91% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00021 $0.00258
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00129
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00052
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00026

Measured 2d ago against content hash 90ff3929b6df, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ai-first-engineering 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.

Origin

This is a copy

91% identical to ai-first-engineering — 4 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.opencode/skills/ai-first-engineering/SKILL.md · 54 lines

What it actually says

AI-First Engineering

Use this skill when designing process, reviews, and architecture for teams shipping with AI-assisted code generation.

Process Shifts

  1. Planning quality matters more than typing speed.
  2. Eval coverage matters more than anecdotal confidence.
  3. Review focus shifts from syntax to system behavior.

Architecture Requirements

Prefer architectures that are agent-friendly:

  • explicit boundaries
  • stable contracts
  • typed interfaces
  • deterministic tests

Avoid implicit behavior spread across hidden conventions.

Code Review in AI-First Teams

Review for:

  • behavior regressions
  • security assumptions
  • data integrity
  • failure handling
  • rollout safety

Minimize time spent on style issues already covered by automation.

Hiring and Evaluation Signals

Strong AI-first engineers:

  • decompose ambiguous work cleanly
  • define measurable acceptance criteria
  • produce high-signal prompts and evals
  • enforce risk controls under delivery pressure

Testing Standard

Raise testing bar for generated code:

  • required regression coverage for touched domains
  • explicit edge-case assertions
  • integration checks for interface boundaries
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 · 54 lines · 21 tokens per session scan A 90ff3929b6df

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ai-first-engineering is a skill published in the GitHub repository zhmxiaowo/opencode-simple (2 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 21 tokens to every session and 258 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 91% identical to ai-first-engineering, differing in 4 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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