first-principles

first-principles is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Daisybastioned440/lite-research-agents. It costs 38 tokens per session (880 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of first-principles, MIT.

A set of rules for making research decisions, experiments, and research outputs simpler, useful, and clearly better in speed or results.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review research ideas, methods, experiments, and outputs before moving forward.
Why use it?
It helps prevent adding complexity without a clear benefit and keeps research focused on results that others can use.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to review research ideas, methods, experiments, and outputs before moving…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/daisybastioned440/lite-research-agents/first-principles
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.

Any agent
npx skills add Daisybastioned440/lite-research-agents --skill first-principles
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Daisybastioned440/lite-research-agents

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 first-principles

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/daisybastioned440/lite-research-agents/first-principles.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/daisybastioned440/lite-research-agents/first-principles)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/daisybastioned440/lite-research-agents/first-principles"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/daisybastioned440/lite-research-agents/first-principles.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 38 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 880 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 100% 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 $0.00038 $0.00880
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.00440
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00176
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00088

Measured 6d ago against content hash 5203b773fc54, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

first-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 6d 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

100% identical to first-principles — 0 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.

skills/first-principles/SKILL.md · 56 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 56 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

First Principles

These principles are non-negotiable constraints on every research decision. Before proposing an idea, designing an experiment, or producing an artifact — check it against all five. If it fails one, rethink before proceeding.


The Principles

1. Simplicity is the primary quality signal. Always monitor the simplicity of the main artifact you are producing. Prefer the simpler solution. A good proxy: lines of code, number of components, number of moving parts. Do not stack ideas together. If a solution requires explaining multiple interacting novelties, it is probably too complex. Complexity is not depth.

2. Efficiency or performance — pick at least one, unambiguously. Work must move the needle on either: (a) efficiency without meaningful performance loss — faster inference, lower memory, fewer training FLOPs; or (b) raw performance. If a contribution does neither clearly, it is not ready. "Comparable performance with added complexity" is a failure mode.

3. Ask "what can someone actually do with this?" For every finding or method, ask: what is the concrete actionable insight for another researcher or practitioner? The best actionable insights satisfy principles 1 and 2. If the main takeaway is complex or does not improve efficiency or performance, the idea needs rethinking. If you cannot state the actionable insight in one sentence, it is not ready.

4. Humans stay in the loop. AI safety and human-AI collaboration are load-bearing assumptions, not caveats. Work that implicitly assumes full autonomy or that sidelines human oversight is out of scope. Every artifact should be legible and controllable by a human in the loop.

5. Do not work on problems that scale away. If a problem is likely to be solved by simply training larger models on more data, it is not a good research target. Before committing to a direction, ask: would a 10x scale-up plausibly dissolve this problem? If yes, redirect.

6. Do work on problems that scaling can newly enable. The inverse of principle 5 is an opportunity: find domains where scaling has not yet been applied, but would unlock something genuinely new if it were. Break the barrier — bring a scalable approach to a domain that has only seen small-scale work. The question is not "will scaling make this irrelevant?" but "could scaling make this possible for the first time?"

Read the full file on GitHub · 56 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. 6d ago First seen · 56 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A 5203b773fc54

Subscribe to this mod's changes

first-principles is a skill published in the GitHub repository Daisybastioned440/lite-research-agents (2 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 880 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to first-principles, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.