principle-attack-the-premise

principle-attack-the-premise is a skill for Claude Code from koolamusic/claudefiles. It costs 51 tokens per session (438 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of principle-attack-the-premise, MIT.

A diagnostic method for situations where two or more fixes based on the same assumption have failed. It records the assumption, measures which actors are affected, and investigates the assignment causing the imbalance.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for analyzing repeated failures, counting how work or outcomes are distributed among actors, and finding the rule or design that creates the imbalance.
Why use it?
Repeatedly applying fixes that share a failed premise can waste time and hide the real cause. This shifts the investigation from patching symptoms to testing the premise itself.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter.

Part of the pstack plugin — 50 skills, 2 agents shipped together

Good fit It is for analyzing repeated failures, counting how work or outcomes are distributed among actors, and finding the rule or design that creates the imbalance.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/koolamusic/claudefiles/principle-attack-the-premise
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 koolamusic/claudefiles --skill principle-attack-the-premise
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/koolamusic/claudefiles

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install pstack, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 50 skills, 2 agents.

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 principle-attack-the-premise

README.md
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Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/koolamusic/claudefiles/principle-attack-the-premise"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/koolamusic/claudefiles/principle-attack-the-premise/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 principle-attack-the-premise

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/koolamusic/claudefiles/principle-attack-the-premise"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/koolamusic/claudefiles/principle-attack-the-premise.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 51 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 438 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 91% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00051 $0.00438
Opus 5.5 $0.00020 $0.00175
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00010 $0.00088
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00044

Measured 2d ago against content hash c87bd7536f77, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

principle-attack-the-premise 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 2d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

91% identical to principle-attack-the-premise — 16 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

plugins/pstack/skills/principle-attack-the-premise/SKILL.md · 24 lines

What it actually says

Attack the Premise

When two or more fixes that share one premise have failed the same gate, suspect the premise, not the fixes.

Why: Each failure under a shared premise is evidence about the premise.

Pattern:

  • Write the premise down. The premise is the one sentence that every failed fix assumed.
  • Take a census before the next fix. Count the imbalance per actor. The census shows which actors hold the imbalance, not how large it is. Write the census as a rerunnable script per Build the Lever.
  • Read the skew. If the same few actors hold most of the imbalance on every run, something assigns them that role. Find what assigns the role. That assignment is the next "why" per Fix Root Causes.
  • Remove the asymmetry instead of compensating for it, per the Laziness Protocol. Rotate the role between actors, randomize the assignment, or move the role, so that no actor holds it on every run. A return path, a shared pool, a batched hand-off, or a periodic rebalance leaves the assignment in place and adds work on every run.

Stop:

  • Do not start the next fix before the premise is written down and the census exists.
  • If the census is even across actors, the premise is not the cause. Look for the cause elsewhere and keep the census as evidence.

This principle is distinct from Redesign from First Principles, which rebuilds a design around a new requirement. It questions a fact the current design assumes.

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. 2d ago First seen · 24 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A c87bd7536f77

Subscribe to this mod's changes

principle-attack-the-premise is a skill published in the GitHub repository koolamusic/claudefiles (130 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 51 tokens to every session and 438 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 91% identical to principle-attack-the-premise, differing in 16 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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