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-encode-lessons-in-structuregit 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-encode-lessons-in-structure)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/backnotprop/pstack/principle-encode-lessons-in-structure"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/backnotprop/pstack/principle-encode-lessons-in-structure/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-encode-lessons-in-structure"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/backnotprop/pstack/principle-encode-lessons-in-structure.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 | $0.00049 | $0.00116 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00020 | $0.00046 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00023 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00012 |
Grade A, and why
principle-encode-lessons-in-structure 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 9d 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
95% identical to principle-encode-lessons-in-structure — 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
Encode Lessons in Structure
If the lesson needs judgment and cannot be encoded, make the instruction more prominent and add an example of the failure mode.
Corollary: If the fix is structural, only use the structural fix. The instruction is the symptom.
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.
- 9d ago Changed · -20 lines 228963799189
- 1mo ago Changed 77044c83a9ac
- 1mo ago First seen · 32 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A 4acdb3f466ef
principle-encode-lessons-in-structure is a skill published in the GitHub repository backnotprop/pstack (2,498 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 116 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 95% identical to principle-encode-lessons-in-structure, differing in 2 lines, and is treated as a copy.
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