principle-laziness-protocol

principle-laziness-protocol is a skill for Claude Code from michael-denyer/pstack-claude. It costs 42 tokens per session (294 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of principle-laziness-protocol, MIT.

A set of principles for keeping code changes small, direct, and easy to maintain.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when refactoring, reviewing the size of a change, or deciding whether a new layer, signal, interface, or helper is actually needed.
Why use it?
It helps avoid unnecessary abstractions, duplicated decisions, deep call chains, and extra code that makes future maintenance harder.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: user-invocable in frontmatter.

Part of the pstack plugin — 54 skills, 2 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it when refactoring, reviewing the size of a change, or deciding whether a new layer, signal, interface, or helper is actually needed.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/principle-laziness-protocol
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 michael-denyer/pstack-claude --skill principle-laziness-protocol
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/michael-denyer/pstack-claude

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install pstack, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 54 skills, 2 agents, 1 hook.

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-laziness-protocol

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/principle-laziness-protocol/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/principle-laziness-protocol)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/principle-laziness-protocol"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/principle-laziness-protocol/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-laziness-protocol

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/principle-laziness-protocol"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/principle-laziness-protocol.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 42 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 294 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 97% 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 $0.00042 $0.00294
Opus 5 $0.00021 $0.00147
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00059
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00029

Measured today against content hash 3496d3bc0e8f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

principle-laziness-protocol 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 today.

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

97% identical to principle-laziness-protocol — 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.

plugins/pstack/skills/principle-laziness-protocol/SKILL.md · 19 lines

What it actually says

Laziness Protocol

Aim for the most result with the least code and complexity.

  • Prefer deletion. When asked to refactor or improve, look for removals before additions.
  • Maintain a flat call hierarchy. Avoid deep call chains. A rich interface that hides substantial work is not a deep call chain. If answering a question requires tracing through more than 3 files or layers, flatten it.
  • Consolidate decisions. Do not repeat the same choice in several places. Put it behind one source of truth and pass the result as a simple flag.
  • Minimize the diff. Make the smallest change that solves the problem. Fewer lines beat "elegant" boilerplate.
  • Question the threading. If a task asks you to pass a new signal through types, schemas, pipelines, or similar layers, stop and look for a more direct path.
  • Sweat the small leaks. Remove tiny pass-throughs, representation leaks, and duplicated choices before they spread. Small leaks compound into permanent coordination costs.

The test: If a human developer would find the code exhausting to maintain, it is a bad solution.

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. today Changed 3496d3bc0e8f
  2. 9d ago First seen · 19 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A e55a09c39f41

Subscribe to this mod's changes

principle-laziness-protocol is a skill published in the GitHub repository michael-denyer/pstack-claude (245 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 294 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 97% identical to principle-laziness-protocol, differing in 2 lines, and is treated as a copy.