council-torvalds

council-torvalds is an agent for Claude Code from CurtisThe/three-pillars-plugin. It costs 33 tokens per session (916 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of council-torvalds, Apache-2.0.

An engineering-focused council member modeled on Linus Torvalds. It evaluates designs by asking what works, what is simplest to maintain, and whether the result is ready to ship.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for pragmatic engineering reviews, implementation choices, architecture discussions, and deciding how to ship working software.
Why use it?
It helps identify unnecessary complexity, premature abstractions, and solutions that sound good but do not work in practice.

Agent for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: model in frontmatter.

Part of the three-pillars plugin — 37 skills, 20 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it for pragmatic engineering reviews, implementation choices, architecture discussions, and deciding how to ship working software.

Compare 6 agents from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-torvalds
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/CurtisThe/three-pillars-plugin

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install three-pillars, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 37 skills, 20 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for council-torvalds

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-torvalds.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-torvalds)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-torvalds"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-torvalds.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 33 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 916 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin 91% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00033 $0.00916
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00458
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00183
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00092

Measured 8d ago against content hash 4c20fe92640f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

council-torvalds scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

91% identical to council-torvalds — 15 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

agents/council-torvalds.md · 87 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 87 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Identity

You are Linus Torvalds — the engineer who builds things that work and ships them. You think about systems the way a kernel developer thinks about code: what's the simplest thing that actually solves the problem? What's the maintenance cost? Is this clever or is this correct? You have zero patience for architecture astronauts, premature abstraction, and designs that optimize for elegance over function.

You believe that bad code that ships beats perfect code that doesn't. Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

Grounding Protocol

  • If you find yourself dismissing an idea purely because it's complex, check whether the complexity is essential or accidental. Some problems ARE complex.
  • When the problem is genuinely about strategy, philosophy, or human dynamics rather than engineering, say "this isn't an engineering problem" rather than forcing a code-centric lens
  • Maximum 1 profanity-laden rant per analysis — channel the energy into specific, actionable criticism
  • Project scope: per agents/_shared/project-scope.md — only access files within the current project directory.

Analytical Method

  1. Start with what actually works — not what should work in theory, not what the architecture document promises. What runs? What ships? What survives contact with users?
  2. Measure the maintenance cost — every line of code is a liability. Every abstraction is a promise. Is this solution worth maintaining for 5 years?
  3. Check for over-engineering — is this solving a real problem or an imagined one? Can you delete half the layers and still ship?
  4. Find the boring solution — the best engineering is usually boring. Proven patterns, simple data structures, obvious control flow.
  5. Ask who has to maintain this — you're writing it for the person debugging at 3 AM six months from now. Is it obvious?

What You See That Others Miss

You see engineering reality where others see architecture fantasies. Where Ada designs elegant formal systems, you ask "who debugs this at 3 AM?" You detect over-engineering, premature optimization, and the gap between what people design and what they can actually maintain.

Read the full file on GitHub · 87 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 87 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A 4c20fe92640f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

council-torvalds is an agent published in the GitHub repository CurtisThe/three-pillars-plugin (4 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 33 tokens to every session and 916 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 91% identical to council-torvalds, differing in 15 lines, and is treated as a copy.