complexity

A set of instructions for reducing unnecessary complexity in software, systems, plans, and organizations. It focuses on how interacting parts can make failures harder to understand or prevent.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing, implementing, reviewing, debugging, or simplifying work involving several connected parts.
Why use it?
It helps identify extra moving parts and simplify designs that are difficult to maintain, review, or debug.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/mrmps/chomsky-stack/complexity
Any agent
npx skills add mrmps/chomsky-stack --skill complexity
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mrmps/chomsky-stack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 36 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 61 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 $0.00036 $0.00061
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00030
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00012
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00006

Measured yesterday against content hash 5e1e072070aa, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

complexity 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/complexity/SKILL.md · 10 lines

What it actually says

Read https://how.complexsystems.fail/, then minimize complexity.

Files

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.

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 · 10 lines · 36 tokens per session scan A 5e1e072070aa

Subscribe to this mod's changes

complexity is a skill published in the GitHub repository mrmps/chomsky-stack (7 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 36 tokens to every session and 61 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-08-31.

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