Engineering rules your coding agent can cite. Free, every rule sourced.
Eleven open Agent Skills for coding agents: nine practice skills built from public engineering posts, plus a diff reviewer and a postmortem writer.
Rules with a source.
- skills: 9 practice skills and 2 workflow skills
- 11
- skills: 9 practice skills and 2 workflow skills
- rules, 15 per practice skill
- 135
- rules, 15 per practice skill
- cited public sources
- 142
- cited public sources
- free to use, change and share
- MIT
- free to use, change and share
- Each rule reads "instead of X, do Y" and links the public post its figure came from
- Sources include Anthropic, Cloudflare, Netflix, Meta, Uber, Discord, Airbnb, LinkedIn and Zepto
- Skills load on their own when your question matches
- engineer-review checks a diff, one finding per line, citing the rule it breaks
- engineer-postmortem turns incident notes into a blameless postmortem
Live, version 1.1.0, at engineer.twistorlabs.com. Source on GitHub.
Works in these agents. Tested each release in Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode.
- Claude Code
- claude.ai and Claude desktop
- Codex
- Cursor
- GitHub Copilot
- Gemini CLI
- OpenCode
- Any agent that reads SKILL.md
One command, any agent.
Skills load on their own when your question matches. In claude.ai or the Claude desktop app, upload a skill zip from the GitHub releases page.
Any agent
Detects the agents on your machine and installs into each.
npx skills add Twistor-Labs/twistor-engineerClaude Code plugin
Adds the engineer-reviewer subagent as well.
/plugin marketplace add Twistor-Labs/twistor-engineer/plugin install twistor-engineer@twistor-engineerNine practice skills, two workflows.
Each practice skill has 15 rules, red flags, how to verify and a sources file.
ai-agent-engineering
Workflow vs agent, tools, context budgets
llm-evals
Eval sets from real failures, graders, CI gates
system-design-scaling
Capacity math, data stores, caches, cells
reliability-incident-response
Staged rollouts, kill switches, postmortems
performance-engineering
Tail latency, profiling, runtime traps
data-ml-platforms
Data contracts, backfills, experiment metrics
dev-productivity-ai-coding
Agentic coding, review at agent volume, CI cost
security-engineering
Sandboxed agents, scoped tools, approval tiers
frontend-mobile-engineering
Performance budgets, safe releases, server-driven UI
engineer-review
Workflow: diff review, one finding per line
engineer-postmortem
Workflow: incident notes to a blameless postmortem
Same question, with and without.
18 questions, answered with and without the skills, graded against 73 written criteria. 13 wins, 5 ties, no losses.
| Skill | With skill | Without |
|---|---|---|
| ai-agent-engineering | 8/8 | 6/8 |
| data-ml-platforms | 11/11 | 8/11 |
| dev-productivity-ai-coding | 7/7 | 4/7 |
| frontend-mobile-engineering | 6/6 | 4/6 |
| llm-evals | 7/7 | 6/7 |
| performance-engineering | 8/8 | 8/8 |
| reliability-incident-response | 9/10 | 8/10 |
| security-engineering | 9/9 | 7/9 |
| system-design-scaling | 6/7 | 5/7 |
| Total | 71/73 | 56/73 |
About 6% more tokens per answer. Figures from the benchmark on engineer.twistorlabs.com. Company names identify the public posts cited; Twistor Labs is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.
Questions about The Twistor's Engineer.
Short answers. The full list lives on the FAQ page.
What does it cost?
Nothing. The skills are MIT licensed and free to use, change and share.
Which agents does it work in?
Claude Code, claude.ai and the Claude desktop app (upload a skill zip), Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, OpenCode and any agent that reads SKILL.md. We test every release in Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode.
How do I install it?
Run npx skills add Twistor-Labs/twistor-engineer, or in Claude Code add the plugin marketplace Twistor-Labs/twistor-engineer and install twistor-engineer@twistor-engineer.
Where do the rules come from?
Every figure in a rule links to the public engineering post it came from, listed in each skill's sources file with a date and a status.
Are you affiliated with the companies cited?
No. Company names identify the public posts we cite. Twistor Labs is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.
Tried it on your repo?
Tell us which rule helped and which one missed. We read every message.
- Free, MIT
- 135 sourced rules
- Any SKILL.md agent