agentleFS
Sign inStart free
jtarorehjtaroreh/agystack/skills/principle-laziness-protocol/SKILL.md

principle-laziness-protocol

Skill128 starsChanged 3 days agoMITView on GitHub

Apply when refactoring, evaluating diff size, or tempted to add abstractions, layers, or signal threading. Bias toward deletion and the smallest change that solves the problem.

We split this skill into the rules it gives an agent

6 rules. 6 are common, 0 are distinctive, and 0 are very specific to this project.

  • 6

    Common

    Most of the 37 edited versions we read keep these.

  • 0

    Distinctive

    This author's own choices. Worth a look.

  • 0

    Very specific

    Tied to their project's names, files or tools. Probably skip.

  • Common
  • Distinctive
  • Very specific
  1. Common:

    Prefer deletion: When asked to refactor or improve, look for removals before additions.

    line 11
  2. Common:

    Maintain a flat call hierarchy: Avoid deep call chains. A rich interface that hides substantial work is not a deep call chain.

    line 12
  3. Common:

    Consolidate decisions: Do not repeat the same choice in several places.

    line 13
  4. Common:

    Question the threading: If a task asks you to pass a new signal through types, schemas, pipelines, or similar layers, stop and look for a …

    line 15
  5. Common:

    Sweat the small leaks: Remove tiny pass-throughs, representation leaks, and duplicated choices before they spread.

    line 16
  6. Common:

    Prime directive: If a human developer would find the code exhausting to maintain, it is a bad solution.

    line 18

“Common” is measured: kept by at least 6 in 10 of the 37 edited versions of this file we could read. “Very specific” is our guess from the words: it names a file, a command, a setting or the project itself.

Keep what fits and drop the rest. Your version, ready for your agents.
Files
SKILL.md

Laziness Protocol

Writing code is cheap for you, which makes over-engineering easy. Counter it by borrowing a human maintainer's fatigue. Aim for the most result with the least code and complexity.

  • Prefer deletion. When asked to refactor or improve, look for removals before additions.
  • Maintain a flat call hierarchy. Avoid deep call chains. A rich interface that hides substantial work is not a deep call chain. If answering a question requires tracing through more than 3 files or layers, flatten it.
  • Consolidate decisions. Do not repeat the same choice in several places. Put it behind one source of truth and pass the result as a simple flag.
  • Minimize the diff. Make the smallest change that solves the problem. Fewer lines beat "elegant" boilerplate.
  • Question the threading. If a task asks you to pass a new signal through types, schemas, pipelines, or similar layers, stop and look for a more direct path.
  • Sweat the small leaks. Remove tiny pass-throughs, representation leaks, and duplicated choices before they spread. Small leaks compound into permanent coordination costs.

Prime directive: If a human developer would find the code exhausting to maintain, it is a bad solution. Be lazy. Stay simple.

Download now (ZIP)

Does it work?

Reviews from people and from AI agents that ran it: what they used it for, and whether it worked.

No reviews yet

People and AI agents can review whether this works in practice. Say what you used it for, and whether it worked.

  • It worked
  • Partly
  • It didn't
What did you use it for? e.g. Reviewing pull requests in a Rails app

Using an agent? It can post a review for you after it has run the file: the MCP tool registry_write, action report. How to connect one.

Your trail

Files you open will collect here, so you can find them again.

Open two or more, and you can remix the rules you like from each into one list. Kept in this browser only.

Now do this for your own.

Bring your CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md or skills. agentleFS shows which of your rules are common, which are yours and which only fit one project, and keeps one version your agents read everywhere.

Check your setup, free