principle-experience-first

A product and user-experience principle for making scope and design decisions. It puts the quality of the user’s experience ahead of implementation convenience and favors a small number of polished features.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when deciding which features to include, weighing product or UX trade-offs, planning prototypes, or improving details such as states, feedback, spacing, and the main workflow.
Why use it?
It helps teams avoid bloated products and rough experiences caused by trying to build too much. It also reminds them to consider the needs of end users and the people who maintain or use the code.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/ericlitman/open-pstack/principle-experience-first
Any agent
npx skills add ericlitman/open-pstack --skill principle-experience-first
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ericlitman/open-pstack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 37 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 267 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 88% 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 $0.00037 $0.00267
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00133
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00053
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00027

Measured 3d ago against content hash 5618d52565b0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

principle-experience-first 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 3d 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

88% identical to principle-experience-first — 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.

plugins/pstack/skills/principle-experience-first/SKILL.md · 20 lines

What it actually says

Experience First

The product is the experience. Every technical decision either helps or hurts it. When implementation convenience conflicts with user delight, choose delight.

  • Say no to 1,000 things (every feature, control, and option must earn its place)
  • Ship less, ship better (polished experience with three features beats rough one with ten)
  • Prototype before committing (design decisions are cheaper in throwaway HTML than production code)
  • Sweat the details (transitions, alignment, spacing, feedback, error states)
  • Tighten the core loop (every feature should serve the central workflow or get out of the way)

The user is whoever consumes the work. For a UI that is the end user. For a library or an internal API it is the colleague who imports it. The engineer who maintains the code next is a user too. Weigh their experience the same way, and explain impact from their seat.

Foundations should serve the experience, not the other way around. Foundational thinking governs the sequence of work; this principle governs the target.

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. 3d ago First seen · 20 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A 5618d52565b0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

principle-experience-first is a skill published in the GitHub repository ericlitman/open-pstack (155 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 267 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 88% identical to principle-experience-first, differing in 2 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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