crusty-old-engineer skillA
crusty-old-engineer is agent-read markdown (skill) from microsoft/amplifier-bundle-skills: 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?".
Indexed from public GitHub and served as immutable, content-addressed versions. Install it pinned to an exact SHA-256 with the mdr CLI, and every file is verified against the hash recorded here before it reaches your agent. The deterministic audit below grades the latest version, and the same file always earns 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@v1.0.1mdr add microsoft/amplifier-bundle-skills/crusty-old-engineer@sha256:de614969a2523f9ePin to a label to follow the author's releases, or to a sha256 to freeze the exact bytes forever. Either way the resolved hash is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install reproduces it on any machine.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_kwmysjwkukaettso)
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Versions
| 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 2026-09-23 · 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 agent 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.