Octocode Prompt Optimizer

Optimize instruction behavior, not prose aesthetics.

Flow: READ → UNDERSTAND → RATE → FIX → VALIDATE → OUTPUT.

Lobby rules and gates

• READ: inspect the whole input and its type; UNDERSTAND: map goal, parts, flow, assumptions, and unknowns.
• RATE: record evidenced issues, severity, and baseline; FIX: address Critical/High issues and name deliberate deferrals.
• VALIDATE: prove intent and required behavior remain correct; OUTPUT: provide the requested artifact and truthful delta.
• Use the full path for multi-section, ambiguous, tool-facing, or high-risk work; combine adjacent steps only for short, low-risk text. Never skip VALIDATE.
• Preserve intent, working branches, identifiers, commands, and required metadata; ask before changing them.
• Verify cited commands, flags, paths, tool names, and schemas before rewriting; flag unverified claims.
• Make only critical behavior mandatory; retain preference language for real preferences. Mutate files only with authority.
• Stop when: a material unknown would change intent, scope, or risk (ask one focused question and pause); instruction authority is ambiguous, or resolving a conflict would override user intent; an edit changed intent or working logic (revert it and return to UNDERSTAND); write authority is missing (deliver a patch-style delta instead of a file change); a VALIDATE check fails twice on the same section (report the weakest branch instead of forcing a pass); a reliability gain has no held-out evidence (report it as unmeasured).

Smart routes — load only what the current step needs

• READ and UNDERSTAND: load references/gates.md — read every section and map intent before judging or drafting.
• RATE: load references/rate.md; FIX: load references/fix.md; VALIDATE: load references/validate.md; OUTPUT: load references/output.md — load only the active gate so later-step advice cannot bias the current decision.
• When instructions conflict or a fix needs a compact instruction pattern, load references/patterns.md — apply the higher authority and log the resolution in one line.
• When reducing noise, load references/conciseness-toolkit.md; when fixing priority/hierarchy load references/attention.md; when choosing a technique for an observed failure load references/prompt-techniques.md — match technique to failure mechanism.
• When optimizing tool or MCP contracts, load references/tool-contracts.md; for agent handoffs load references/agent-communication.md; for typed packet boundaries load references/zod-agent-contracts.md — make inputs, outputs, authority, and failure states explicit.
• When context can overflow, load references/context-budget.md; when repeated calls share stable prefixes load references/prompt-caching.md — control relevance, pagination, latency, and cost.
• When reliability must be measured, load references/evaluation-data.md — build realistic held-out scenarios, verifiers, metrics, and a failure ledger.
• When instructions consume retrieved or user-supplied content, load references/untrusted-content.md — preserve the boundary between data and authority.
• When improving this skill, prefer octocode-graph-eval; otherwise load references/improve-loop.md — require measurable acceptance instead of intuition.

Related routes

• Use octocode-skills for skill-folder architecture/review; octocode-research to verify cited contracts; octocode-graph-eval for held-out behavior.
• Use octocode-subagent for delegation topology.

Done gate

• This skill ships no scripts: every gate above is model-driven, so never report a check you did not actually perform.
• Done requires VALIDATE passed, the OUTPUT variant matching the request, and the reported before/after score, changed files, and deferrals all matching reality.