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 ericlitman/open-pstack --skill principle-build-the-levergit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ericlitman/open-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/ericlitman/open-pstack/principle-build-the-lever)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericlitman/open-pstack/principle-build-the-lever"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericlitman/open-pstack/principle-build-the-lever.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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 | $0.00071 | $0.00613 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00036 | $0.00307 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00014 | $0.00123 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00007 | $0.00061 |
Grade A, and why
principle-build-the-lever 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 8d 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
94% identical to principle-build-the-lever — 6 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
Build the Lever
When the work isn't trivial, build the tool that does it instead of doing it by hand.
Why: Two payoffs. Throughput: a codemod, generator, or script does the work the same way every time and reruns for free. Confidence: the tool is one artifact a reviewer can read and rerun to check the work. Hand-done changes can only be re-verified by redoing them. A deterministic script turns "trust me" into "run this".
Pattern: Default to building the lever. Skip it only when the task is genuinely trivial, a couple of obvious edits you can see at a glance.
- Do the first unit by hand to learn the recipe, then build the tool. Prove it by rerunning it on that unit and diffing against your hand-done version. Make the lever safe to rerun. A reviewer will.
- Codemod or script for edits, generator for repetitive files, a dump-to-sqlite query for analysis, a rerunnable check for verification.
- A deterministic lever beats fan-out. If the tool can process every unit in one pass, run it yourself; don't fan out delegates to hand-apply what a script can do.
- When you fan work out to subagents, write the lever as a skill they all read: the recipe, the verification contract, and the do-not-touch fences in one artifact, so every delegate inherits the same hardened version instead of re-explaining it per prompt and watching each one drift. Keep it outside the delegates' write scope so they can't quietly edit the contract.
- Applying this principle produces a file. If you cited it and there is no codemod, script, generator, or delegate skill in the diff, you didn't apply it.
- Commit the lever when the work outlives the session, so the next run reruns it instead of redoing it.
Balance: The bar is triviality, not repetition. A one-off still earns a lever when the lever is what makes the work checkable. Per the Laziness Protocol, build the smallest script that does or proves the job, never a framework.
Distinct from Encode Lessons in Structure, which makes a recurring instruction a durable guardrail. This is throughput and reviewability on the work in front of you. For scripting the verification itself, see Prove It Works.
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.
- 8d ago First seen · 24 lines · 71 tokens per session scan A dbcf88a49190
principle-build-the-lever is a skill published in the GitHub repository ericlitman/open-pstack (226 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 71 tokens to every session and 613 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 94% identical to principle-build-the-lever, differing in 6 lines, and is treated as a copy.
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