principles

A catalogue of software-development principles, including accessibility, API design, clean architecture, code quality, reviews, communication, and concurrency. It is used to choose and apply one of these principles.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you need guidance on accessible interfaces, versioned APIs, layered code, simpler implementation, structured code reviews, concise output, or safe concurrent programs.
Why use it?
It gives developers a ready reference for making consistent decisions about design, implementation, and review quality.

Agent

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/lugassawan/swe-workbench/principles
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/lugassawan/swe-workbench
Per session 0 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,108 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found 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 $0.00000 $0.01108
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00554
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00222
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00111

Measured 2d ago against content hash 3efed8b03e29, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

principles 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 2d 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.

shared/agents/principles.md · 32 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 32 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Principle catalog

All swe-workbench principle skills available in this plugin. Use the Skill tool to invoke any of these.

  • swe-workbench:principle-accessibility — Accessibility: WCAG 2.2 AA, semantic HTML, ARIA, keyboard navigation, focus management, color contrast, screen-reader compatibility.
  • swe-workbench:principle-api-design — API design: contract-first, versioning, idempotency, REST/RPC/event trade-offs.
  • swe-workbench:principle-clean-architecture — Clean Architecture: dependency rule, ports and adapters, domain-centric layering.
  • swe-workbench:principle-clean-code — Clean code: DRY, KISS, YAGNI, naming, function length, abstraction level.
  • swe-workbench:principle-code-review — Code review: five-axis lens (correctness, security, design, tests, comment quality), confidence-based filtering, comment tone, nitpick filtering.
  • swe-workbench:principle-communication — Communication & output discipline: terse "caveman" output mode (lite/full/ultra), drop filler/hedging, preserve code symbols and error strings verbatim, auto-clarity carve-out.
  • swe-workbench:principle-concurrency — Concurrency: race conditions, deadlock, structured concurrency, cancellation, backpressure.
  • swe-workbench:principle-cost-awareness — Cost awareness: FinOps mindset, egress, right-sizing, scale-to-zero, cost-per-request, storage tiers, observability cost.
  • swe-workbench:principle-data-modeling — Data modeling: storage paradigm selection, normalization depth, indexing strategy, hot-key avoidance, schema evolution, query-first design, retention.
  • swe-workbench:principle-ddd — Domain-Driven Design: bounded contexts, aggregates, ubiquitous language, domain events.
  • swe-workbench:principle-design-patterns — Design patterns: GoF catalog — Strategy, Factory, Observer, Decorator, Adapter, and more.
  • swe-workbench:principle-distributed-systems — Distributed systems: CAP/PACELC, consistency models, consensus, quorum, logical clocks, replication, delivery semantics.
  • swe-workbench:principle-error-handling — Error handling: errors as values, classification, wrapping, retry, circuit breakers.
  • swe-workbench:principle-event-driven — Event-driven architecture: event sourcing, CQRS, sagas, schema evolution, consumer groups, DLQ, idempotent handlers.
  • swe-workbench:principle-i18n — Internationalization & localization: locale-aware formatting, time zones, plural rules, message catalogs, RTL layout, ISO 8601, currency.
  • swe-workbench:principle-observability — Observability: logs vs metrics vs traces, structured logging, OpenTelemetry, SLI/SLO.
  • swe-workbench:principle-performance — Performance: latency vs throughput, profile-before-optimize, Big-O, allocation pressure, data locality, N+1 queries.
  • swe-workbench:principle-postmortem — Postmortem principles: blameless culture, root cause analysis (5 Whys, Fishbone/Ishikawa), incident document structure, action-item discipline, MTTD/MTTR metrics.
  • swe-workbench:principle-refactoring — Refactoring discipline: Fowler's catalog, smell→move mapping, rule of three, characterization-tests-first, small behavior-preserving steps with green between.
  • swe-workbench:principle-release-engineering — Release engineering: semver discipline, expand-contract for breaking changes, idempotent release automation, post-release verification, rollback planning, release-notes audience.
  • swe-workbench:principle-resiliency — Resiliency: failure domains, bulkheads, graceful degradation, fail-fast vs fail-soft, health checks, blast radius containment, idempotency keys, safe retry, rate limiting, token bucket, backpressure, jitter.
  • swe-workbench:principle-security — Security: trust boundaries, input validation, secrets handling, secure defaults, threat modeling.
  • swe-workbench:principle-solid — SOLID principles: SRP, OCP, LSP, ISP, DIP — responsibility, coupling, abstractions.
  • swe-workbench:principle-tdd — TDD: red-green-refactor, test-first, F.I.R.S.T., Arrange-Act-Assert.
  • swe-workbench:principle-testing — Testing strategy: test pyramid, doubles taxonomy, coverage-vs-confidence, mutation testing, flaky-test triage, contract testing, fixtures and builders, property-based tests.
  • swe-workbench:principle-version-control — Version control: atomic commits, commit-message quality, branching strategy, rebase vs merge, squash vs preserve, PR description quality.
  • swe-workbench:principle-product-design — UX and product design: Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics, visual hierarchy, information architecture, interaction design patterns, design-system compliance, responsive design. Accessibility/WCAG → swe-workbench:principle-accessibility.

Read the full file on GitHub · 32 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. 2d ago First seen · 32 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 3efed8b03e29

Subscribe to this mod's changes

principles is an agent published in the GitHub repository lugassawan/swe-workbench (2 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 1,108 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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