pstack is a collection of plain Agent Skills and engineering principles that guide AI-assisted software development across coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Pi, Cursor, and OpenCode. It is for developers who want reusable practices for tasks including testing, technical writing, debugging, review, and coordinating agent work. The catalogue entries are the project's skills, agents, and plugin.
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.
npx skills add backnotprop/pstack --skill principle-attack-the-premisegit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/backnotprop/pstackWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/backnotprop/pstack/principle-attack-the-premise)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/backnotprop/pstack/principle-attack-the-premise"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/backnotprop/pstack/principle-attack-the-premise/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/backnotprop/pstack/principle-attack-the-premise"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/backnotprop/pstack/principle-attack-the-premise.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Socket pass
- Snyk pass
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00041 | $0.00423 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00016 | $0.00169 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00085 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00042 |
Grade A, and why
principle-attack-the-premise 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 10d 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.
This is a copy
91% identical to principle-attack-the-premise — 2 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.
What it actually says
Attack the Premise
When two or more fixes that share one premise have failed the same gate, suspect the premise, not the fixes.
Why: Each failed fix is evidence against the belief it assumed. A third fix on the same premise spends effort where the evidence already says the cause is not.
Pattern:
- Write the premise down. The premise is the one sentence that every failed fix assumed.
- Test the premise before the next fix. Find an observation that would come out differently if the premise were false, and make it. Look at how the failures are distributed, not only at how large they are. Make the check rerunnable per Build the Lever.
- Follow the evidence. If it contradicts the premise, the cause is elsewhere. Look for what the failures have in common that the premise did not predict. If it confirms the premise, ask the next "why" per Fix Root Causes. The earlier fixes may have treated a consequence instead of the cause.
- Remove the condition instead of compensating for it, per the Laziness Protocol. If the evidence shows that one part always lands on the losing side, change what puts it there. A mechanism that cleans up after it leaves the cause in place and adds work on every run.
Stop: Do not start the next fix before the premise is written down and tested.
This principle is distinct from Redesign from First Principles, which rebuilds a design around a new requirement. It questions a fact the current design assumes.
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.
- 10d ago Changed · -2 lines · -10 tokens per session 6a932884daad
- 1mo ago First seen · 24 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A c87bd7536f77
principle-attack-the-premise is a skill published in the GitHub repository backnotprop/pstack (2,800 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 423 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 91% identical to principle-attack-the-premise, differing in 2 lines, and is treated as a copy.
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