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-minimize-reader-loadgit 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-minimize-reader-load)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards/principle-minimize-reader-load"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards/principle-minimize-reader-load/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-minimize-reader-load"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards/principle-minimize-reader-load.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 | $0.00044 | $0.00415 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00018 | $0.00166 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00083 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00042 |
Grade A, and why
principle-minimize-reader-load 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
88% identical to principle-minimize-reader-load — 0 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
Minimize Reader Load
Maintainability is the work a reader must do to understand code. Track two axes: layers to trace (indirections between the question and the answer) and state to hold (hidden or mutable context the reader must keep in their head). LOC, cyclomatic complexity, and "clean architecture" are proxies. Reader load is the thing that matters. The two axes are independent. A flat file with 50 globals can be as hard to reason about as a 6-layer adapter stack. Guard both. This is the human analog of Guard the Context Window. Working memory is finite for readers too.
- Collapse layers that cost more than they save: wrappers with one caller, adapters with no second implementation, speculative indirection that was never needed. Inline them.
- Make adjacent layers change the abstraction. A layer that repeats the same methods and arguments adds reader load without compression. Collapse pass-through layers.
- Demand interface compression. A broad interface that hides little complexity makes readers learn both the surface and the implementation. Prefer boundaries that hide meaningful decisions.
- Shrink state scope: prefer pure functions (returns over mutations), locals over fields, fields over module state, and module state over globals. Derive instead of sync.
- Name the invariant at the boundary, not in every consumer, so the reader learns it once.
- Before adding a layer or a piece of state, ask: does it reduce reader load elsewhere by at least as much?
The test: can a new reader answer "where does X come from?" and "what can change X?" in under 30 seconds? If not, cut layers or cut state.
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 · 19 lines · 44 tokens per session scan A d10f8f6f185a
principle-minimize-reader-load is a skill published in the GitHub repository minghinmatthewlam/agent-guards (47 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 44 tokens to every session and 415 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 88% identical to principle-minimize-reader-load, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.
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