yagni

yagni is a skill for Claude Code from JordanCoin/codingskills. It costs 65 tokens per session (1,040 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A coding principle called YAGNI, meaning “You Aren’t Gonna Need It.” It says to build for confirmed needs now instead of adding features or abstractions for hypothetical future requirements.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when deciding whether to add future-proofing, extra configuration, speculative features, or a new abstraction to a codebase.
Why use it?
It reduces code that must be understood, tested, and maintained even though nobody currently needs it. This helps avoid accidental complexity and hard-to-remove abstractions.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the coding-skills plugin — 9 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when deciding whether to add future-proofing, extra configuration, speculative features, or a new abstraction to a codebase.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jordancoin/codingskills/yagni
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 JordanCoin/codingskills --skill yagni
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JordanCoin/codingskills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install coding-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 9 skills.

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 yagni

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jordancoin/codingskills/yagni/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jordancoin/codingskills/yagni)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jordancoin/codingskills/yagni"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jordancoin/codingskills/yagni/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 yagni

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jordancoin/codingskills/yagni"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jordancoin/codingskills/yagni.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 65 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,040 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 $0.00065 $0.01040
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00520
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00208
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00104

Measured 8d ago against content hash c2176588a2e3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

yagni 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.

skills/yagni/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.

YAGNI — You Aren't Gonna Need It

Before Applying

If .agents/stack-context.md exists, read it first. Apply this principle using idiomatic patterns for the detected stack. For framework-specific details, use context7 MCP or web search — don't guess.

Principle

Do not build for hypothetical future requirements. Build what is needed now, and refactor when actual requirements emerge.

Why This Matters in Production

Speculative code is the #1 source of accidental complexity. Every abstraction, configuration option, or extension point you add "just in case" has a real cost: it must be understood, tested, maintained, and debugged. Unused code paths are the most dangerous — they rot silently, give false confidence in test coverage, and create surface area for bugs.

Premature generalization is worse than duplication. Duplication is obvious and easy to fix later. A wrong abstraction is painful to undo because other code grows to depend on it.

Rules

  1. Solve the problem in front of you. If you have one use case, write code for one use case. Not two. Not "what if later."
  2. Three strikes, then abstract. The first time you write something, just write it. The second time, note the duplication. The third time, extract the pattern — now you have enough data to design the right abstraction.
  3. Delete speculative code paths. If a feature flag has never been toggled, a configuration option has never been changed, or a parameter has never been passed anything other than the default — remove it.
  4. Don't build plugin systems for one plugin. Interfaces, registries, and extension points are justified only when you have multiple concrete implementations today.
  5. Prototype when uncertain. If you aren't sure whether something will be needed, spike it in a branch. Don't merge speculative infrastructure into main.

Anti-Patterns

  • Adding parameters "for flexibility" that only ever receive one value
  • Building an event system when you have two components that could just call each other
  • Creating abstract base classes with a single concrete implementation
  • Writing configuration files for values that never change
  • Adding database columns "we might need later"
  • Implementing caching before measuring whether there's a performance problem
  • Building a microservice when a function call would suffice

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. 8d ago First seen · 90 lines · 65 tokens per session scan A c2176588a2e3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

yagni is a skill published in the GitHub repository JordanCoin/codingskills (7 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 65 tokens to every session and 1,040 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.

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