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 mhenke/john-ousterhout-skills --skill aposd-critiquegit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mhenke/john-ousterhout-skillsWrote 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/mhenke/john-ousterhout-skills/aposd-critique)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mhenke/john-ousterhout-skills/aposd-critique"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mhenke/john-ousterhout-skills/aposd-critique/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/mhenke/john-ousterhout-skills/aposd-critique"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mhenke/john-ousterhout-skills/aposd-critique.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 | $0.00031 | $0.04356 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00015 | $0.02178 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00006 | $0.00871 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00003 | $0.00436 |
Grade A, and why
aposd-critique 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 12d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 342 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
aposd critique — Design Critique
Principles-based design evaluation from A Philosophy of Software Design, 2nd Edition (Ousterhout, 2021). Combines two independent assessments into a single report with persona walkthroughs. Follows the impeccable critique convention.
Usage: aposd critique [module, class, or subsystem]
Quick Reference
| Question | Look At |
|---|---|
| Is the design approach sound? | Design Principles Score (pass count) |
| What's the single biggest problem? | Priority Issues (top P0) |
| Would a different designer see it differently? | Persona Walkthroughs section |
| Is it getting better over time? | Trend line from persisted snapshots |
Setup
-
Determine the skill directory. Find this skill's
locationfield in the available_skills section of the system prompt. Let<SKILL_DIR>be the directory containingSKILL.md(i.e.,dirname(location)). All script and reference paths below are relative to<SKILL_DIR>. -
Resolve the target to a concrete file path or module name. If the target does not exist or is empty, report "Target not found or empty" and exit the critique (no findings to evaluate). Scan all files in the target — no sampling. For large targets (>50 files), use sub-agents to parallelize the scan across directory groups.
Pre-check: Verify <SKILL_DIR>/scripts/critique-storage.mjs exists. If not found, set persist=false and skip all persistence steps. Continue the critique without snapshots.
-
Compute the slug for persistence and trend tracking:
node <SKILL_DIR>/scripts/critique-storage.mjs slug "<resolved-path>"Keep it. If the command exits non-zero, skip persistence and trend for this run, but continue the critique.
-
Read
.aposd/critique/ignore.mdif it exists. Drop matching findings silently; it is the only prior-run input critique consumes.
Input / Output
- Input — A module, class, or subsystem path. Defaults to current directory if omitted. All files in the target are scanned.
- Output — Combined critique report: Tactical Tornado Verdict, Design Principles Score (X/18 pass), Priority Issues with P0-P3 severity, Persona Walkthroughs. Persisted to
.aposd/critique/for trend tracking.
What ships with it
6 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.
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.
- 12d ago First seen · 342 lines · 31 tokens per session scan A a48b762c6607
aposd-critique is a skill published in the GitHub repository mhenke/john-ousterhout-skills (6 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 4,356 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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