principles

principles is a skill for Claude Code from elct9620/ai-coding-skills. It costs 94 tokens per session (793 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A code-design guide based on SOLID, KISS, DRY, and YAGNI principles. These principles help decide what classes, interfaces, and dependencies should look like when building new functionality.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when creating a feature from scratch or choosing interface boundaries, class responsibilities, and dependency direction. It is not intended for simple restructuring or code-smell fixes.
Why use it?
It helps resolve design trade-offs before implementation, such as how to divide responsibilities or reduce unwanted dependencies.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the coding plugin — 9 skills, 4 commands shipped together

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 skills/elct9620/ai-coding-skills/principles
Any agent
npx skills add elct9620/ai-coding-skills --skill principles
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/elct9620/ai-coding-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install coding, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 9 skills, 4 commands.

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 principles

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/elct9620/ai-coding-skills/principles.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/elct9620/ai-coding-skills/principles)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/elct9620/ai-coding-skills/principles"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/elct9620/ai-coding-skills/principles.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 94 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 793 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 5.1 $0.00094 $0.00793
Opus 5 $0.00047 $0.00396
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00159
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00079

Measured 6d ago against content hash e64bbc6603c1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, 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 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.

skills/principles/SKILL.md · 78 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 78 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

  • Detected a code smell (long method, feature envy)? → Use refactoring for specific techniques
  • Need a specific pattern (Strategy, Factory)? → Use design-patterns for selection and implementation
  • Deciding which architectural layer or structure code belongs in? → Use architecture

Applicability Rubric

Condition Pass Fail
New feature from scratch Building without existing reference Modifying existing code
Design trade-off Choosing between competing approaches Implementation path is clear
Interface/boundary design Defining class responsibilities or contracts Internal implementation detail
Dependency structure Deciding coupling and injection strategy No dependency decisions

Apply when: Any condition passes Do NOT apply when: The task is purely about restructuring existing code (use refactoring) or detecting code smells (use refactoring)

Core Principles

SOLID

Principle Description Violation Sign
Single Responsibility One reason to change Class does too many things
Open/Closed Open for extension, closed for modification Frequent changes to existing code
Liskov Substitution Subtypes must be substitutable Type checks or conditional logic on types
Interface Segregation Many specific interfaces over one general Clients implement unused methods
Dependency Inversion Depend on abstractions, not concretions Direct instantiation of dependencies

KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)

  • Prefer straightforward solutions
  • Avoid unnecessary complexity
  • Write code that's easy to understand
  • If it's hard to explain, it's too complex

DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself)

  • Extract repeated logic into functions
  • BUT: Premature abstraction is worse than duplication
  • Rule of three: Abstract after third repetition
  • Accept some duplication for clarity

YAGNI (You Aren't Gonna Need It)

Read the full file on GitHub · 78 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 · 78 lines · 94 tokens per session scan A e64bbc6603c1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

principles is a skill published in the GitHub repository elct9620/ai-coding-skills (5 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 94 tokens to every session and 793 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. 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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