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.
npx skills add koolamusic/claudefiles --skill principle-subtract-before-you-addgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/koolamusic/claudefilesWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/koolamusic/claudefiles/principle-subtract-before-you-add)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/koolamusic/claudefiles/principle-subtract-before-you-add"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/koolamusic/claudefiles/principle-subtract-before-you-add/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/koolamusic/claudefiles/principle-subtract-before-you-add"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/koolamusic/claudefiles/principle-subtract-before-you-add.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00039 | $0.00179 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00016 | $0.00072 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00036 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00018 |
Grade A, and why
principle-subtract-before-you-add 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.
This is a copy
83% identical to principle-subtract-before-you-add — 2 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.
What it actually says
Subtract Before You Add
When evolving a system, remove complexity first, then build. Default to subtraction.
Make simplification a continual investment. Leave the design slightly simpler and more capable behind the same or smaller surface than you found it.
- Sequence removal before construction
- Cut before you polish (get to the minimum before investing in quality)
- Design for observed usage, not speculative edge cases
- No speculative validators, parsers, or guards beyond what the spec demands
- Simplify prompts (remove redundant instructions, excessive templates)
- When a reference has no novel content, delete it rather than leaving a stub
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.
- 2d ago First seen · 19 lines · 39 tokens per session scan A 8c93bb9d1a7f
principle-subtract-before-you-add is a skill published in the GitHub repository koolamusic/claudefiles (130 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 39 tokens to every session and 179 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 83% identical to principle-subtract-before-you-add, differing in 2 lines, and is treated as a copy.
Other skills, from other repositories
local-ai-agents
Build local-first AI agents that run entirely on a developer workstation with Microsoft Foundry Local and Qwen function-calling models. Covers Small Language Models (SLMs), the OpenAI-compatible local endpoint, sandboxed local tools, local RAG with Chroma, local MCP servers, hybrid cloud/local routing, and the…
systematic-debugging
Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.
next-cache-components-adoption
Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…
chat-pet-sprite-creation
Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.
cpu-profile-analysis
Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…
insight-error-page
Write or audit an insight-kind error page for the Next.js dev overlay. Use when creating a new errors/ .mdx page, auditing an existing one, or checking that a page matches the framework fix cards. Covers page structure, title alignment, FixCard cards with Copy prompt button, code snippets, terminology verification…