s4h-design-simplicity

s4h-design-simplicity is a skill for Claude Code from human-avatar/skills-for-humanity. It costs 84 tokens per session (1,676 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A design guide for reducing a product or interface to the parts needed for its purpose.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to simplify a design, reduce clutter, find the essential form, or decide what can be cut without breaking the intended function.
Why use it?
It helps remove unnecessary elements that make something harder to understand, maintain, or use.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the skills-for-humanity plugin — 197 skills, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it to simplify a design, reduce clutter, find the essential form, or decide what can be cut without breaking the intended function.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-simplicity
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 human-avatar/skills-for-humanity --skill s4h-design-simplicity
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install skills-for-humanity, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 197 skills, 1 hook.

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 s4h-design-simplicity

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-simplicity/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-simplicity)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-simplicity"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-simplicity/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for s4h-design-simplicity

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-simplicity"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-simplicity.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 84 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,676 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00084 $0.01676
Opus 5 $0.00042 $0.00838
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00335
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00168

Measured 12d ago against content hash 4e13246ceaab, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

s4h-design-simplicity 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 12d 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/s4h-design-simplicity/SKILL.md · 129 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 129 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design: Simplicity

The hardest design work is not adding — it is knowing what to remove. Every element that is added must justify its presence. Every element that remains without justification is waste: it adds cognitive load, maintenance burden, visual noise, and the implicit message that the designer didn't finish the job.

Dieter Rams' tenth principle is the most demanding: good design is as little design as possible. He doesn't mean sparse aesthetics. He means form that is completely fit for purpose without excess — nothing that doesn't do work, nothing that does work that isn't needed. Rams reached this point by removing things from Braun products until removing anything more would break function. The test is not "is this minimal?" but "is this necessary?"

Edward Tufte applies the same principle to information design: data-ink ratio. Of all the ink on the page, what fraction encodes actual data? Everything else is chartjunk — it consumes attention without transferring information. Remove it. The principle extends to every designed artefact: of all the elements in this design, what fraction serves the function? The rest can go.

The difficulty is that subtraction feels destructive. Features that were added with reasons seem like they should stay. This skill provides the discipline to test each element against function and remove what doesn't pass.


Your Process

Step 1: Enumerate Every Element List every element in the current design. Be exhaustive. For a product: features, controls, labels, states. For a document: sections, headings, callouts, annotations, formatting choices. For a UI: screens, interactions, fields, error states, modals, navigation items. For a system: components, interfaces, parameters, configurations.

If the list is long, group by layer or component before enumerating.

Framing check: Confirm the design and the purpose it should serve before continuing. State what you've identified — the thing being simplified and its primary function — in one sentence, then use AskUserQuestion:

  • Question: "I'm reading this as: [your one-sentence framing of the design and its purpose]. Is that right?"
  • Header: "Framing"
  • Options:
    • Yes — proceed — framing is correct
    • Adjust — one element is off; user will correct it before you continue
    • Reframe — different situation than read; incorporate the correction before proceeding

Read the full file on GitHub · 129 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. 12d ago First seen · 129 lines · 84 tokens per session scan A 4e13246ceaab

Subscribe to this mod's changes

s4h-design-simplicity is a skill published in the GitHub repository human-avatar/skills-for-humanity (223 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 84 tokens to every session and 1,676 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

customer-journey-map

Visualize every touchpoint a customer has with a product or service — stages, actions, emotions, pain points, opportunities.

tupe12334/instinct · 31 tokens

double-diamond

Design problems with two diamond phases: Discover/Define (right problem), Develop/Deliver (right solution).

tupe12334/instinct · 25 tokens

token-audit

Audit a design system's token definitions for naming violations, missing semantic tiers, and structural debt. This audits how tokens are defined and organised, NOT how they are consumed in code. Trigger when someone says: audit my tokens, token naming review, are my tokens consistent, token health check, review my…

murphytrueman/design-system-ops · 93 tokens

codebase-index

Generate a pre-computed component index from a design system codebase — YAML infrastructure files containing a component inventory, relationship graph, and summary statistics that AI agents and MCP servers consume. This produces machine-readable index files in .ai/index/, NOT a health report or quality assessment.…

murphytrueman/design-system-ops · 132 tokens

prototype

Use when asked to prototype one design question through a cheap logic or UI experiment, including button-driven state-model checks. Not for polished artifacts: use polished-web-prototype.

OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin · 36 tokens

review-design

Review digital artifacts against the user’s task, creative direction, functional and accessibility requirements, and actual delivery medium. Inspect renders, native files, playback or interaction as appropriate; exercise relevant failure and recovery paths and report evidence-backed findings. Use for design review or…

doodledood/manifest-dev · 67 tokens