principle-make-operations-idempotent

principle-make-operations-idempotent is a skill for Claude Code from michael-denyer/pstack-claude. It costs 46 tokens per session (290 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of principle-make-operations-idempotent, MIT.

A design guide for making commands and processing steps safe to repeat after crashes, restarts, or retries. Such operations are idempotent when running them again leads to the same final state.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing startup routines, lifecycle commands, locks, schedulers, or processing loops that may run more than once or resume after failure.
Why use it?
It prevents duplicate work, stale temporary files, and inconsistent results after an interrupted run. The guide recommends checking existing state and reconciling partial work before continuing.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: user-invocable in frontmatter.

Part of the pstack plugin — 56 skills, 2 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it when designing startup routines, lifecycle commands, locks, schedulers, or processing loops that may run more than once or resume after failure.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/principle-make-operations-idempotent
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-make-operations-idempotent
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 56 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-make-operations-idempotent

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/principle-make-operations-idempotent"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/principle-make-operations-idempotent.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 46 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 290 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 89% 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 $0.00046 $0.00290
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00145
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00058
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00029

Measured 10d ago against content hash 576260695df9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

principle-make-operations-idempotent 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 10d 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

89% identical to principle-make-operations-idempotent — 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-make-operations-idempotent/SKILL.md · 25 lines

What it actually says

Make Operations Idempotent

Design operations so they converge to the correct state regardless of how many times they run or where they start from. Every state-mutating operation should answer: "What happens if this runs twice? What happens if the previous run crashed halfway?"

Why: Commands, lifecycle operations, and processing loops run where crashes, restarts, and retries are normal. If partial state changes the next run's outcome, every restart becomes a debugging session.

The pattern:

  • Convergent startup: scan for existing state, clean stale artifacts, adopt live sessions
  • Content-based cleanup: compare by content equivalence, not creation order
  • Self-healing locks: use PID-based stale lock detection
  • Idempotent scheduling: failed work respawns cleanly, fresh input regenerated after each cycle

The test:

  1. What happens if this runs twice in a row?
  2. What happens if the previous run crashed at every possible point?
  3. Does re-execution converge to the same end state?

If any answer is "it depends on what state was left behind," the operation needs a reconciliation step.

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. 10d ago First seen · 25 lines · 46 tokens per session scan A 576260695df9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

principle-make-operations-idempotent is a skill published in the GitHub repository michael-denyer/pstack-claude (281 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 46 tokens to every session and 290 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 89% identical to principle-make-operations-idempotent, differing in 2 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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