principal-agent

principal-agent is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from kangarooking/cangjie-skill. It costs 134 tokens per session (1,531 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A Chinese-language guide based on the principal-agent idea: the person who owns a decision or its result may have different incentives from someone acting on another person's behalf. It applies this lens to jobs, companies, and partnerships.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when comparing large and small companies, deciding between employment and entrepreneurship, designing partner incentives, or diagnosing weak accountability and outsourcing problems.
Why use it?
It gives you a way to examine why people may avoid responsibility or optimize for themselves when rewards and ownership are disconnected.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it when comparing large and small companies, deciding between employment and entrepreneurship, designing partner incentives, or diagnosing weak accountability and outsourcing problems.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kangarooking/cangjie-skill/principal-agent
About the project

Cangjie Skill is a system that turns methods from books, long videos, podcasts, and other source material into executable skills for AI agents. It helps users package knowledge into callable workflows, using the repository's code, methods, and templates; catalogue add-ons relate to these agent skills.

kangarooking/cangjie-skill · 11,353 stars · on GitHub

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 kangarooking/cangjie-skill --skill principal-agent
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kangarooking/cangjie-skill

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 principal-agent

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kangarooking/cangjie-skill/principal-agent/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kangarooking/cangjie-skill/principal-agent)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kangarooking/cangjie-skill/principal-agent"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kangarooking/cangjie-skill/principal-agent/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 principal-agent

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kangarooking/cangjie-skill/principal-agent"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kangarooking/cangjie-skill/principal-agent.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 134 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,531 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 $0.00134 $0.01531
Opus 5.5 $0.00054 $0.00612
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00027 $0.00306
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00153

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 463b7e667668, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

principal-agent 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 1mo 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.

books/naval-almanack-skill/principal-agent/SKILL.md · 120 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 120 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

委托-代理识别

R — 原文 (Reading)

如果你想做好,那你必须亲自去做。当你是委托人,那你就是主人你就会关心并且会把工作做得很好。当你是代理人,你是在为别人的利益做事,你可能会把事情做得很糟糕。……你能把某个人的收益和他所创造的价值联系得越紧密,就越能把他们变成委托人。

— 纳瓦尔·拉维坎特, 《纳瓦尔宝典》 第一章·财富

I — 方法论骨架 (Interpretation)

委托-代理问题是微观经济学最基本的问题:利益归属决定行为质量。 当你是委托人(自己的钱/自己的事),你会做好;当你是代理人(为别人利益做事),你会为自己优化。 推论三条: ① 选择位置时,优先选「每个人都能感到自己是委托人」的小组织; ② 设计合作时,把收益与创造的价值绑定得越紧越好(股权、分成、责任到人); ③ 警惕「代理人叙事」——媒体和现代社会长期洗脑你「需要一个知识渊博的代理人」,而委托人直觉其实人人都有。 用在职业上:为别人打工=代理人拿最低报酬;拥有产权和判断=委托人拿剩余。

A1 — 书中的应用 (Past Application)

案例 1: 为别人工作拿最低报酬

  • 问题: 为什么高薪打工者无法致富
  • 方法论的使用: 雇主是委托人(承担风险/责任/知识产权),雇员是代理人拿「最低限度的报酬」
  • 结论: 工资再高也不是财富
  • 结果: 医生开私人诊所(品牌)后才成为委托人

案例 2: 小公司人人像委托人

  • 问题: 如何让团队用心做事
  • 方法论的使用: 越小的公司,每个人越能感觉到自己是委托人
  • 结论: 「你越觉得自己不是代理人,你将会把工作做得更好」
  • 结果: 组织结构越扁平、收益越绑定,行为质量越高

A2 — 触发场景 (Future Trigger) ★

用户会在什么情境下需要这个 skill?

  1. 职业选择:「去大公司还是小创业公司」「打工还是自己干」
  2. 合作设计:「怎么设计分成/激励让合伙人真的上心」
  3. 困惑现象:「为什么同事都在磨洋工/外包总出问题」
  4. 自我诊断:「我是在为谁的利益工作」

语言信号

  • "大公司 vs 小公司怎么选"
  • "怎么让团队/合伙人更用心"
  • "为什么没人对结果负责"
  • "principal-agent / ownership / who benefits"

与相邻 skill 的区分

  • 与 wealth-structure 的区别: 财富结构是个人资产框架;本 skill 是组织/合作中的激励透镜
  • 与 judgment-training 的区别: 委托代理是判断力心智模型库里的一个模型

E — 可执行步骤 (Execution)

  1. 诊断你当前的角色

    • 完成标准: 回答「我的收益与创造的价值绑定程度(低/中/高)」「我是委托人还是代理人」
  2. 寻找或创建委托人位置

    • 完成标准: 列出 1–2 个具体动作(要求股权/分成、做有产权的事、加入小组织)
  3. 检查合作方的激励结构

    • 完成标准: 对每个合作者问「他赢的判定标准是什么」,确认利益是否一致
    • 判停条件: 若发现纯代理结构(收益完全脱钩)且无法改变,标记为高风险合作
  4. 为未来决策保留记录

    • 完成标准: 记录本次诊断结论,作为下次职业/合作选择的输入

B — 边界 (Boundary) ★

不要在以下情况使用此 skill

  • 用户要具体薪酬谈判话术(本 skill 给结构不给话术)
  • 管理细节(如何监督/考核)不是本 skill 的重点——先改结构再谈管理

作者在书中警告的失败模式

  • 依赖代理人: 「媒体和现代社会花了大量时间来洗脑你:让你认为需要一个代理人」
  • 收益脱钩: 收益与价值脱钩时,代理人必然为自己优化

作者的盲点 / 时代局限

  • 「小公司人人像委托人」在规模化后不成立,作者未给大组织化解决方案
  • 委托-代理只是心智模型之一,不能解释所有组织问题

容易混淆的邻近方法论

  • wealth-structure: 两者的交集是「股权绑定」,但视角不同(组织 vs 个人)

相关 skills (阶段 3 定稿)

  • composes-with: wealth-structure(股权绑定是共同解法)、judgment-training

审计信息

  • 验证通过: V1 ✓ / V2 ✓ / V3 ✓ (v07)
  • 测试通过率: 见 test-results.md
  • 蒸馏时间: 2026-08-01

Read the full file on GitHub · 120 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files 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. 1mo ago First seen · 120 lines · 134 tokens per session scan A 463b7e667668

Subscribe to this mod's changes

principal-agent is a skill published in the GitHub repository kangarooking/cangjie-skill (11,353 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 134 tokens to every session and 1,531 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.