philosophy-of-software-design
Skill0 starsChanged 17 days agoNo licenceView on GitHub
Design, change, and review code the way John Ousterhout teaches in "A Philosophy of Software Design" — treat complexity as the enemy, build deep modules with simple interfaces, hide information, make interfaces somewhat general-purpose, pull complexity downward, define errors out of existence, design it twice, and program strategically instead of tactically. Use when designing or refactoring a module, class, service, hook, component, function, or internal API; deciding whether to split or merge code; choosing how code reports errors; naming things; writing or judging comments; planning a change that touches many files; or reviewing a diff for design quality. Triggers on "deep module", "shallow module", "information leakage", "pass-through", "tactical vs strategic", "design it twice", "define errors out of existence", "Ousterhout", "APOSD", "red flags", or "how should I structure this".
In this repository8 other files it gives its agents.
- plg/AGENTS.mdAGENTS.md
- be-more-ambitiousSkill
- data-modelingSkill
- fastify-best-practicesSkill
- plgSkill
- socratesSkill
- steve-jobsSkill
- stripe-api-designSkill
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We split this skill into the rules it gives an agent
13 rules. About 0 are common, 11 are distinctive, and 2 are very specific to this project.
≈0
Common · estimate
Many files like this have a rule of this kind.
≈11
Distinctive · estimate
This author's own choices. Worth a look.
2
Very specific
Tied to their project's names, files or tools. Probably skip.
No licence file, so all rights are reserved — read it at the source. We count its rules but don't quote them. Read them on GitHub.
≈ “Common” is an estimate: at least 1 in 5 of the 350,495 skill files we read have a rule of the same kind, not the same words. “Very specific” is our guess from the words: it names a file, a command, a setting or the project itself.
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