Engineering principles

Skill barcelosvinicius/basic-engineering/plugins/be/skills/engineering-principles

Claude Code plugin + npm base for AI-assisted engineering: 25 skills, 12 agents, slash commands, session-continuity hook. Also works with Copilot, Cursor, and others.

Install

npx -y skills add barcelosvinicius/basic-engineering --skill engineering-principles

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

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What its author says it does

Copied from the file, not written here

Use when making a design decision and needing the project-independent ground rules — UX, security, coupling, testing, observability, resilience, and the AI-assisted documentation protocol. One-page digest with pointers into the full engineering-principles.md document.

SKILL.md

3.3 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

Skill: Engineering Principles (Digest)

One-page digest of the universal principles in engineering-principles.md (the full document ships at the base root). Load the full section only when the decision at hand needs it.

The principles at a glance

§	Principle	Core rule
§1	UX first	The interface exists to reduce the user's cognitive effort; accessibility (§1.5) is baseline quality, not a feature
§2	Security by default	Validate server-side, hash passwords with modern KDFs, parameterize queries, audit dependencies (§2.8 supply chain)
§3	Low coupling, high cohesion	Dependencies point inward (api → service → domain ← data); business logic never in controllers or repositories
§4	Contracts and evolution	Public APIs are versioned (§4.4); breaking changes get a new version, never a silent change
§5	Tests as specification	Every behavior has a test; tests are deterministic; coverage targets agreed, not implied
§6	Performance is a feature	Paginate collections, index queried columns, measure before optimizing
§7	Resilience	Timeouts on every external call; failures are expected inputs, not exceptions
§8	Simplicity	The simplest design that meets today's requirement; complexity must pay rent

AI-assisted work appendices

§	Topic	Core rule
§A	Documentation protocol	Docs are a product: HISTORY.md, structural-analysis.md, and lessons-learned.md stay ≤ 1 commit behind the code
§A.3	Session briefs	Every session starts from recorded state, not from memory — see `proc-session-continuity`
§B	Agent behavior	Agents declare a verifiable goal, stay in scope, and delegate outside their role
§C	Context as graph	Load the narrowest layer that answers the question; depth-first by default — see `proc-sdd`

How to use the hierarchy

When rules conflict, the most specific wins:

engineering-principles (universal)
  → AI context file (project)
    → agent (role)
      → skill (how-to)
        → spec/task (unit of work)

Always-on vs on-demand (the "rules" layer)

be keeps the always-loaded layer thin so context stays cheap:

Always on (the rules): these universal principles, the project's CLAUDE.md, and each agent's prompt-defense guardrail banner — paid on every call, so keep them short (proc-context-budget).
On demand: skills (only the description loads until one triggers) and their resource files. Detailed "how" lives here, not in the always-on layer.

There is deliberately no separate rules/ directory — it would duplicate this digest and CLAUDE.md. Put a durable, always-true rule in CLAUDE.md (project-specific) or a skill (reusable how-to) — never both.

Related skills

Security: sec-secrets-management, be-jwt-auth-patterns · Quality: proc-code-review, qa-test-data-builders · Delivery: proc-release-checklist, infra-ci-cd · Operations: ops-observability.