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 agentmods add skills/siddhamapple/needless/needless-helpnpx skills add siddhamapple/needless --skill needless-helpgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/siddhamapple/needlessWhat 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 | $0.00050 | $0.00479 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00025 | $0.00239 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00010 | $0.00096 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00048 |
Grade A, and why
needless-help 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.
What it actually says
Display this reference card when invoked. One-shot -- do NOT change mode, write flag files, or persist anything.
Levels
| Level | Trigger | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| Lite | /needless lite |
Build what's asked, name the minimal alternative in one line. |
| Full | /needless |
The ladder enforced: YAGNI -> stdlib -> native -> 1 line -> minimum. Default. |
| Ultra | /needless ultra |
YAGNI extremist. Challenges requirements before building. |
| Off | /needless off |
Disable. Resume with /needless. |
Level sticks until changed or session end.
Skills
| Skill | Trigger | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| needless | /needless |
Minimal mode. Simplest solution that works. |
| needless-review | /needless-review |
Over-engineering review: one line per finding, net count. |
| needless-help | /needless-help |
This card. |
The ladder (quick ref)
- Does this need to exist? (YAGNI) -> skip
- Stdlib does it? -> use it
- Native platform feature? -> use it
- Already-installed dep? -> use it
- One line? -> one line
- Only then: minimum code that works
Deactivate
Say "stop needless" or "normal mode". Resume anytime with /needless.
/needless off also works.
Mark intentional shortcuts
// needless: global lock, per-account locks if throughput matters
// needless: O(n) scan, index on col if table grows large
More
Full docs + examples: https://github.com/siddhamapple/needless
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.
- yesterday First seen · 55 lines · 50 tokens per session scan A ba36f72f4ab5
needless-help is a skill published in the GitHub repository siddhamapple/needless (2 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 50 tokens to every session and 479 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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