Best Practices

What it does

When your agent uses it

• : auditing current implementation against industry standards
• Checking compliance with best practices
• Benchmarking implementation quality
• Verifying a codebase meets a standard

Example prompts

• “/best-practices”

Requirements

• Pre-approved tools (allowed-tools): Read, Grep, Glob, WebSearch, WebFetch, Agent, Skill

Workflow steps

4 steps, taken from the step headings in SKILL.md.

1. 1Industry Research
2. 2Codebase Analysis
3. 3Adversarial Debate (Cannot Be Skipped)
4. 4Gap Report

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit c9a2036. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

• Tool permissions

  Pre-approves these tools, so the agent can use them without asking each time:

  • Read
  • Grep
  • Glob
  • WebSearch
  • WebFetch
  • Agent
  • Skill

  From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

• Runs code

  No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md (its code samples are mermaid).

  From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

• Network

  No URLs in SKILL.md.

  From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

• Credentials

  Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

  From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Best Practices loads about 2.5k tokens when it runs, and up to ~3.8k if it reads all its reference files. Until then it costs about 128 tokens; SKILL.md has 880 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it

~128

When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches

~2.5k

With references · SKILL.md plus every file in references/, read only if the agent opens them

~3.8k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from sd0xdev/sd0x-harness at commit c9a2036, republished under its MIT licence (© sd0xdev). 880 words, ~2,512 tokens.

name

best-practices

description

Industry best practices conformance audit with mandatory adversarial debate. Produces audit artifact: verdict (OK/WARN/FAIL) + gap roadmap + debate proof. Use when: auditing current implementation against industry standards, checking compliance with best practices, benchmarking implementation quality, verifying a codebase meets a standard. Not for: broad research/discovery without audit target (use /deep-research), code review (use /codex-review), architecture design (use /codex-architect).

allowed-tools

Read, Grep, Glob, WebSearch, WebFetch, Agent, Skill

sequenceDiagram
    participant C as Claude
    participant W as WebSearch/WebFetch
    participant R as Codebase (Grep/Read)
    participant B as /codex-brainstorm

    C->>W: Phase 1: Industry Research
    W-->>C: Best practices summary
    C->>R: Phase 2: Codebase Analysis
    R-->>C: Current state analysis
    Note over C: GATE — must proceed to Phase 3
    C->>B: Phase 3: Adversarial Debate
    B-->>C: Equilibrium result + threadId
    C->>C: Phase 4: Gap Report

1. Search related code within effective scope (keywords, file patterns)
2. Read core implementation (entry points, config, usage)
3. Cross-check against Phase 1 best practices item by item

Input: /best-practices Prometheus metrics design
Phase 1: Search Prometheus naming conventions, label best practices, cardinality
Phase 2: Analyze src/observability/ metric definitions, label usage, cardinality controls
Phase 3: /codex-brainstorm debate on compliance
Phase 4: Gap analysis — e.g., inconsistent label naming, missing _total suffix

Input: /best-practices Redis caching strategy
Phase 1: Search Redis caching patterns, cache invalidation, TTL strategies
Phase 2: Analyze src/service/ Redis usage patterns
Phase 3: /codex-brainstorm debate
Phase 4: Report — e.g., missing cache-aside pattern, inconsistent TTL settings

Input: /best-practices error handling
Phase 1: Search error handling best practices, error classification, SRE error budget
Phase 2: Analyze error constants, filters, middleware error handling
Phase 3: /codex-brainstorm debate
Phase 4: Report

© sd0xdev, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

SKILL.md and 2 other files (references) in skills/best-practices of sd0xdev/sd0x-harness.

• SKILL.md
• references/debate-guide.md
• references/output-templates.md

Open the folder on GitHubat commit c9a2036