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 minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards --skill principle-attack-the-premisegit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/minghinmatthewlam/agent-guardsWrote 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/minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards/principle-attack-the-premise)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards/principle-attack-the-premise"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards/principle-attack-the-premise/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/minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards/principle-attack-the-premise"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards/principle-attack-the-premise.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 | $0.00051 | $0.00437 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00020 | $0.00175 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00087 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00044 |
Grade A, and why
principle-attack-the-premise 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
100% identical to principle-attack-the-premise — 14 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
Attack the Premise
When two or more fixes that share one premise have failed the same gate, suspect the premise, not the fixes.
Why: Each failure under a shared premise is evidence about the premise.
Pattern:
- Write the premise down. The premise is the one sentence that every failed fix assumed.
- Take a census before the next fix. Count the imbalance per actor. The census shows which actors hold the imbalance, not how large it is. Write the census as a rerunnable script per Build the Lever.
- Read the skew. If the same few actors hold most of the imbalance on every run, something assigns them that role. Find what assigns the role. That assignment is the next "why" per Fix Root Causes.
- Remove the asymmetry instead of compensating for it, per the Laziness Protocol. Rotate the role between actors, randomize the assignment, or move the role, so that no actor holds it on every run. A return path, a shared pool, a batched hand-off, or a periodic rebalance leaves the assignment in place and adds work on every run.
Stop:
- Do not start the next fix before the premise is written down and the census exists.
- If the census is even across actors, the premise is not the cause. Look for the cause elsewhere and keep the census as evidence.
This principle is distinct from Redesign from First Principles, which rebuilds a design around a new requirement. It questions a fact the current design assumes.
What ships with it
1 file 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.
- 2d ago First seen · 24 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A f20c3f9b5183
principle-attack-the-premise is a skill published in the GitHub repository minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards (47 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 51 tokens to every session and 437 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to principle-attack-the-premise, differing in 14 lines, and is treated as a copy.
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