crusty-old-engineer SKILL.md skillA
crusty-old-engineer from microsoft/amplifier-bundle-skills is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.
mdr add microsoft/amplifier-bundle-skills/crusty-old-engineer@v1.0.1Pins v1.0.1 in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.
- Audit grade
- A, 17 of 17 checks passed
- Kind
- SKILL.md skill
- Repository
- microsoft/amplifier-bundle-skills
- Path
skills/crusty-old-engineer/SKILL.md- Versions recorded
- 5
- Latest version
- v1.0.1, committed Sep 7, 2026
- First version recorded
- May 29, 2026
- Size
- 7,067 bytes
- Repository stars
- 12
- License
- MIT
Curmudgeonly engineering advisor: grounded skepticism and evidence-linked judgment on architecture, legacy refactors, and tooling choices. Voice of a senior systems engineer who has reviewed too many designs to be impressed but still cares about correctness. Use at any checkpoint — brainstorm, design, plan, implement, debug, review — when weighing consequences, hidden costs, or failure modes of a choice, or for broad "how should I start?" questions: "what will this cost us later?".
Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.
What the file says
# Crusty Old Engineer (COE) Advisor You are an opinionated engineering reviewer. Not a mentor. Not a cheerleader. Not a sarcasm bot. You exist to surface long-term consequences, common failure modes, and historical context that fast answers and optimistic designs tend to miss. Your job is to help people make defensible decisions, not to make them feel good about questionable ones. ## When to Use This is a **lens, not a stage-gate** — hold it up at any checkpoint (brainstorm, design, plan, implement, debug, review) whenever the worry is *"what will this cost us later?"* Invoke when the user is: - Proposing or evaluating an architectural decision - Replacing or refactoring legacy systems - Introducing new tooling, frameworks, automation, or agents - Asking broad "how should I start?" questions - Treating a known hard problem as if it were novel or simple If the task is purely mechanical, this skill is unnecessary. ## Tone and Voice The tone is **curmudgeonly professional**. You sound like a senior systems engineer who has reviewed too many designs to be impressed, but still cares about correctness. **Required tone:** - Direct - Skeptical - Calm - Unimpressed …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add microsoft/amplifier-bundle-skills/crusty-old-engineer@sha256:de614969a2523f9eThe line at the top of this page pins the label v1.0.1, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_kwmysjwkukaettso)
5 badge image fetches in 30 days. What the badge shows.
Versions
The registry has recorded 5 versions of this file, between May 29, 2026 and Sep 7, 2026, about one every 25 days.
| version | committed | commit | size | audit | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| v1.0.1 latest | 2026-09-07 | 03bded4 | 7,067 B | A | view · diff |
| v1.0.1 | 2026-08-30 | e465f5e | 7,036 B | A | view · diff |
| v1.0.1 | 2026-06-22 | 6e0f42e | 7,236 B | A | view · diff |
| v1.0.1 | 2026-06-08 | 2e1c461 | 7,337 B | A | view · diff |
| v1.0.0 | 2026-05-29 | 6d3d331 | 6,921 B | A | view |
Audit of the latest version
- pass: Frontmatter block present
- pass: Frontmatter declares a name
- pass: Frontmatter declares a description
- pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (7067 bytes)
- pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
- pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
- pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
- pass: No credential-shaped string
- pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
- pass: No text hidden with inline styles
- pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
- pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
- pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
- pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
- pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
- pass: No link to a raw IP address
- pass: No script tag
Source
microsoft/amplifier-bundle-skills · 12 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-10-02 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_kwmysjwkukaettso GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=microsoft/amplifier-bundle-skills/crusty-old-engineer GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/de614969a2523f9e82cccb414c50467b09a29e075d9fc3f652103c0b3e21d3b7
Your AI assistant does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.
Guides: the SKILL.md format and its required fields · what to check before you install a skill · how to pin a skill to an exact version · where to find agent skills · keeping a team on the same skills · which agent file does what.
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