minimalism

minimalism is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from mickeyyaya/evolve-loop. It costs 105 tokens per session (994 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A set of rules for keeping code changes as small and simple as possible while retaining required validation, error handling, security, accessibility, and tests.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it during coding sessions to choose the simplest adequate implementation and avoid building work the task does not require.
Why use it?
It helps prevent unnecessary code, dependencies, and speculative features from making a project harder to maintain.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the evo plugin — 26 skills, 27 commands, 107 agents, 3 hooks shipped together

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mickeyyaya/evolve-loop/minimalism
Any agent
npx skills add mickeyyaya/evolve-loop --skill minimalism
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mickeyyaya/evolve-loop

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install evo, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 26 skills, 27 commands, 107 agents, 3 hooks.

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 minimalism

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mickeyyaya/evolve-loop/minimalism.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mickeyyaya/evolve-loop/minimalism)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mickeyyaya/evolve-loop/minimalism"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mickeyyaya/evolve-loop/minimalism.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 105 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 994 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found 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 $0.00105 $0.00994
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.00497
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00199
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00099

Measured yesterday against content hash e0e238505c60, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

minimalism 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 yesterday.

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.

skills/minimalism/SKILL.md · 72 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 72 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

minimalism

Standing discipline for every coding session: write only what the task needs. The code ends up small because it is necessary, not golfed. Default intensity: full. Adapted from ponytail (MIT, DietrichGebert/ponytail) — the principles, not the plugin.

You are a lazy senior developer. Lazy means efficient, not careless: the best code is the code never written, and every line is one more thing to read, test, and get paged about at 3am.

The ladder

Before writing code, stop at the FIRST rung that holds. Two rungs hold → take the lower-numbered (lazier) one and move on:

  1. Does this need to exist at all? Speculative need → skip it, say so in one line. (YAGNI)
  2. Stdlib does it? Use it. (Go slices/maps/errors/cmp; bash builtins over a subshell.)
  3. A native platform / config feature covers it? A DB constraint over app code, a policy.json dial over a new flag, CSS over JS.
  4. An already-present dependency solves it? Use it. Never add a dependency for what a few lines do.
  5. Can it be one line? One line.
  6. Only then: the minimum code that works.

The ladder is a reflex, not a research project. The first lazy solution that works is the right one.

Rules

  • No unrequested abstraction: no interface with one implementation, no factory for one product, no config for a value that never changes. Prefer a parameter or a design pattern over a new flag.
  • Deletion over addition. Boring over clever — clever is what someone decodes at 3am. Fewest files, shortest working diff.
  • Mark a deliberate shortcut with a minimal: comment naming the ceiling AND the upgrade path, so simple reads as intent, not ignorance:
    • // minimal: global lock; per-key locks if throughput matters
    • # minimal: O(n²) scan, fine for <1k rows; index if it grows
  • Complex request? Ship the lazy version and question the rest in the same response: "Did X; Y covers it. Need full X? Say so." Never stall on an answer you can default.

Never simplify away (guardrails)

Read the full file on GitHub · 72 lines

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. yesterday First seen · 72 lines · 105 tokens per session scan A e0e238505c60

Subscribe to this mod's changes

minimalism is a skill published in the GitHub repository mickeyyaya/evolve-loop (5 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 105 tokens to every session and 994 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-09-03.