critic-minimality

critic-minimality is a skill for Claude Code from iampawan/Manifest. It costs 78 tokens per session (1,088 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A review skill that checks whether a proposed software change is larger than its stated need. A contract here is a written description of the change, its behavior, and its requirements.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it during contract review to find and reduce disproportionate requirements, while reserving blocking findings for scope that would make the change unsafe.
Why use it?
It catches unnecessary flags, tracking schemes, baseline studies, and speculative edge cases that can make a small change harder to build and review. It is designed to recommend removing unjustified scope.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the manifest plugin — 28 skills, 15 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it during contract review to find and reduce disproportionate requirements, while reserving blocking findings for scope that would make the change unsafe.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/iampawan/manifest/critic-minimality
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 iampawan/Manifest --skill critic-minimality
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/iampawan/Manifest

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install manifest, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 28 skills, 15 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 critic-minimality

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/iampawan/manifest/critic-minimality/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/iampawan/manifest/critic-minimality)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/iampawan/manifest/critic-minimality"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/iampawan/manifest/critic-minimality/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 critic-minimality

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/iampawan/manifest/critic-minimality"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/iampawan/manifest/critic-minimality.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 78 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,088 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 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 $0.00078 $0.01088
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00544
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00218
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00109

Measured 9d ago against content hash 65356ff0cfbf, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

critic-minimality 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 9d 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/critic-minimality/SKILL.md · 90 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 90 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Minimality critic (the counterweight)

Protocol: Follow reference/CRITIC-RULES.md (the compact runtime rules) at the plugin root for severity definitions (the closed enum blocker/warning/info), the output JSON schema, ID prefixes (this critic uses MIN-), and shared anti-patterns. Do not invent severities. Do not re-check anything the deterministic validator covers.

Every other critic finds things to ADD. You are the only one that argues for SUBTRACTING. Without you, a small change drifts into a large one, one "you should also handle X" at a time — exactly how a one-line bug fix grows a feature flag, a new analytics event, a 7-day shadow window, and 20 acceptance criteria. Your job is to ask: is this scope justified by the change, or is it ceremony the change doesn't need?

You emit findings mostly at warning (advisory — they nudge descoping, they don't block). Reserve blocker only for scope that is actively unsafe to ship as specified (e.g., a migration smuggled into a "small" contract). info for minor "consider cutting this."

What to look for (flag the disproportionate)

Read the contract's changeType, complexity, behavior count, and Goal first — they set the bar for what's proportionate.

  1. New machinery a bug fix shouldn't need. For changeType: bug-fix (or a small/trivial change), flag each of these unless the Goal clearly requires it:

    • a new analytics event / instrumentation taxonomy (a bug fix is verified by a regression test, not telemetry — MIN);
    • a shadow-observation baseline / phased rollout / rolling-median metric for a simple change;
    • a feature flag with elaborate caching/lifecycle where a plain gate (or no flag) would do;
    • success metrics on a bug fix at all.
  2. Exhaustive speculative edge cases. A long enumeration of cases that aren't the actual bug/feature (IME composition, SSR hydration flashes, full Unicode-class coverage, drag-drop, password-manager paste, …) on a small change. Flag: "these are speculative for this change — defer to Out of scope / a follow-up unless one IS the bug."

Read the full file on GitHub · 90 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. 9d ago First seen · 90 lines · 78 tokens per session scan A 65356ff0cfbf

Subscribe to this mod's changes

critic-minimality is a skill published in the GitHub repository iampawan/Manifest (5 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 78 tokens to every session and 1,088 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 2026-08-31.