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 pproenca/dot-skills --skill radical-simplificationgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pproenca/dot-skillsWrote 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/pproenca/dot-skills/radical-simplification)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pproenca/dot-skills/radical-simplification"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pproenca/dot-skills/radical-simplification/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/pproenca/dot-skills/radical-simplification"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pproenca/dot-skills/radical-simplification.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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 | $0.00197 | $0.02215 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00079 | $0.00886 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00039 | $0.00443 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00020 | $0.00221 |
Grade A, and why
radical-simplification 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 1mo 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 116 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Radical Simplification — Cognitive Moves for Collapsing Complex Problems
Distillation of the documented working method of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers who consistently turn complex problems into simple solutions. The skill is not a step list — it is a toolbox of cognitive moves, each correcting a specific wrong default a capable model has when faced with complexity. The moves are mostly orthogonal; pick the one that matches the symptom.
This is the thinking layer that sits above refactoring (code-simplifier), metric design (deterministic-metric-design), and reviews (design-review). Those skills apply a methodology to a known shape of artifact. This skill is the methodology itself — how to arrive at the simple shape in the first place.
When to Apply
Use this skill when:
- The user says the problem feels too complicated, that the team is going in circles, or that there must be a simpler way
- A proposed design has accreted parameters, dependencies, or branches and feels overengineered
- A plan has been drafted but unresolved decisions remain, and the agent is about to commit to assumed answers
- A bug investigation has tried several variants of the same approach without progress
- A review surfaces complexity that may be accidental (Brooks) rather than essential
- The agent is asked to find an elegant solution to a hard engineering or product problem
- Forward search has exhausted and the agent needs a different angle (work backwards, invert, transfer from another domain)
- The agent is producing fluent-sounding output but cannot back it up under expansion (Feynman test)
This skill is not for cleaning up code that already does the right thing — that is code-simplifier. Use this when the approach itself is what needs to get simpler.
How to Use
The nine categories are orthogonal cognitive moves. Match the move to the symptom:
| Symptom | Reach for | First rule to read |
|---|---|---|
| Solving feels off — maybe the wrong problem | Frame | frame-restate-problem |
| Plan drafted but unresolved decisions remain | Clarify | clarify-interview-one-at-a-time |
| Drowning in cases, parameters, branches | Reduce | reduce-toy-case-first |
| Parts are tangled; changes ripple | Decompose | decomp-orthogonal-axes |
| Forward search is exponential or stuck | Invert | invert-work-backwards |
| Missing the structural truth of the system | Constrain | constrain-name-the-invariant |
| Stuck inside the current vocabulary | Transfer | transfer-cross-domain-analogue |
| The specific problem keeps resisting | Generalize | gen-rising-sea |
| Producing fluent output you cannot back up | Audit | audit-feynman-technique |
What ships with it
24 files 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.
- AGENTS.md 6.2 KB
- assets/templates/_template.md 990 B
- metadata.json 2.0 KB
- references/_sections.md 4.3 KB
- references/audit-fermi-sanity-check.md 1.7 KB
- references/audit-feynman-technique.md 2.1 KB
- references/audit-name-the-confusion.md 1.9 KB
- references/clarify-interview-one-at-a-time.md 3.2 KB
- references/clarify-prefer-source-over-asking.md 2.4 KB
- references/constrain-dimensional-check.md 2.1 KB
- references/constrain-name-the-invariant.md 1.7 KB
- references/decomp-orthogonal-axes.md 1.7 KB
- references/decomp-what-vs-how.md 1.6 KB
- references/frame-essential-vs-accidental.md 1.8 KB
- references/frame-find-decision-point.md 1.3 KB
- references/frame-restate-problem.md 1.5 KB
- references/gen-rising-sea.md 2.2 KB
- references/invert-assume-failure.md 1.9 KB
- references/invert-work-backwards.md 1.6 KB
- references/reduce-limit-cases.md 1.6 KB
- references/reduce-pareto-compress.md 1.5 KB
- references/reduce-toy-case-first.md 1.5 KB
- references/transfer-cross-domain-analogue.md 2.0 KB
- references/transfer-suspect-vocabulary-lock-in.md 2.2 KB
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.
- 1mo ago First seen · 116 lines · 197 tokens per session scan A 1fbb0e00fe30
radical-simplification is a skill published in the GitHub repository pproenca/dot-skills (215 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 197 tokens to every session and 2,215 once invoked, about $0.0008 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-08-30.
Other skills, from other repositories
local-ai-agents
Build local-first AI agents that run entirely on a developer workstation with Microsoft Foundry Local and Qwen function-calling models. Covers Small Language Models (SLMs), the OpenAI-compatible local endpoint, sandboxed local tools, local RAG with Chroma, local MCP servers, hybrid cloud/local routing, and the…
systematic-debugging
Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.
next-cache-components-adoption
Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…
chat-pet-sprite-creation
Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.
cpu-profile-analysis
Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…
insight-error-page
Write or audit an insight-kind error page for the Next.js dev overlay. Use when creating a new errors/ .mdx page, auditing an existing one, or checking that a page matches the framework fix cards. Covers page structure, title alignment, FixCard cards with Copy prompt button, code snippets, terminology verification…