golden-principles

golden-principles is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator. It costs 89 tokens per session (625 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of ten operating principles for designing and running coding agents in a repository.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when creating or changing agents and skills, defining repository governance, or checking whether an agent workflow follows the project’s rules.
Why use it?
It provides shared rules for storing context, validating inputs, enforcing safety checks, reviewing work, and composing agent workflows.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Good fit Use it when creating or changing agents and skills, defining repository governance, or checking whether an agent workflow follows the project’s rules.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/golden-principles
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 jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator --skill golden-principles
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 golden-principles

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/golden-principles/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/golden-principles)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/golden-principles"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/golden-principles/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 golden-principles

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/golden-principles"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/golden-principles.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 89 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 625 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 warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Prompt Injection · line 51
    Large whitespace padding was detected (a block of blank lines or a long run of spaces). This can push injected instructions below or to the right of the visible area so a human reviewer never sees them while the agent still reads them. Manual review of the hidden content is recommended.
    Fix: Remove the large whitespace padding (blank-line blocks or long space runs) and review any content hidden below or to the right of it. Keep skill files compact and reviewable so no instructions can be
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 $0.00089 $0.00625
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.00313
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00125
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00063

Measured 8d ago against content hash 5b692c6e795a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

golden-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 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.

.github/skills/golden-principles/SKILL.md · 54 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 54 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Golden Principles

These 10 principles govern how every agent operates in this repository. They are adapted from the Harness Engineering philosophy for agent-driven infrastructure development.


Rules

These 10 principles are the agent operating rules. Detailed explanations follow in The 10 Principles.

  1. Repository Is the System of Record — all context lives in-repo
  2. Map, Not Manual — instructions point to deeper sources
  3. Enforce Invariants, Not Implementations — set boundaries, allow autonomous expression
  4. Parse at Boundaries — validate inputs and outputs at module edges
  5. AVM-First, Security Baseline Always — prefer Azure Verified Modules + non-negotiable security baseline
  6. Golden Path Pattern — prefer shared utilities over hand-rolled helpers
  7. Composable Workflows — small, well-bounded steps that compose
  8. Human Approval at Critical Gates — explicit gates between steps
  9. Adversarial Review — challenger subagents stress-test creative outputs
  10. Continuous Lessons — capture observations and feed back into the system

Steps

Applying the principles to a new agent or skill:

  1. Read all 10 principles before designing the agent or skill
  2. For each design decision, ask which principles apply (typically 2–3 will dominate)
  3. Run the per-principle test listed in The 10 Principles
  4. Where a principle conflicts with an implementation choice, change the implementation — principles are non-negotiable
  5. Document deviations in an ADR if a principle was knowingly relaxed

The 10 Principles

Each principle has a non-negotiable rule and a quick test for compliance. The canonical detail (full text + per-principle tests + the "How to Apply These Principles" section for agents, contributors, and code review) lives in references/principles.md. The summary list above is a one-line index; for any decision-making use, load the reference. The two sources are kept in sync — if you spot drift, update the reference and sync the summary.

Read the full file on GitHub · 54 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 8d ago First seen · 54 lines · 89 tokens per session scan A 5b692c6e795a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

golden-principles is a skill published in the GitHub repository jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator (50 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 89 tokens to every session and 625 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 2026-09-03.

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