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 The-Artificer-of-Ciphers-LLC/skills-from-the-artificer --skill choose-boring-technologygit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/The-Artificer-of-Ciphers-LLC/skills-from-the-artificerWrote 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/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/choose-boring-technology)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/choose-boring-technology"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/choose-boring-technology/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/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/choose-boring-technology"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/choose-boring-technology.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 | $0.00101 | $0.00740 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00040 | $0.00296 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00020 | $0.00148 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00074 |
Grade A, and why
choose-boring-technology 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 — 58 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Choose Boring Technology
"Consider how you would solve your immediate problem without adding anything new." — Dan McKinley, 2015
The core idea
McKinley's essay argues that every new technology you adopt is a "complexity token" you spend — and you only have a limited budget. Novel technologies bring unknown failure modes, thin internal expertise, and higher cognitive load. Boring technologies (well-understood, widely deployed, battle-tested) have predictable failure modes, rich documentation, broad community knowledge, and don't surprise you at 2am.
The law doesn't say "never adopt new tech." It says: be deliberate about when you do, and have a high bar.
How to apply it
Step 1 — Solve the problem with what you have first. Before evaluating any new option, ask: can you solve this with something already in your stack? A Postgres table instead of a new cache? A cron job instead of a message queue? The answer is often yes, and the boring solution is usually good enough longer than you expect.
Step 2 — Budget your complexity tokens. Assess how many unfamiliar technologies are already in flight on the team. If you're already running Kubernetes, a new microservices framework, and a new language, adding another unknown is risky. Teams have limited capacity to learn and operate things reliably.
Step 3 — Score the tradeoff honestly. Ask these questions about the proposed tech:
- Does anyone on the team have real production experience with it?
- What does failure look like, and do we know how to recover?
- Is there a boring alternative that covers 80% of the use case?
- What's the operational cost (monitoring, on-call, upgrades)?
- Are we adopting this because it actually solves our problem, or because it's interesting?
Step 4 — Prefer addition over replacement. If you do adopt something new, keep the old thing running where it already works. Don't rip and replace — introduce incrementally and let the new thing earn its footprint.
When boring is the right call (almost always)
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 · 58 lines · 101 tokens per session scan A b616751f4699
choose-boring-technology is a skill published in the GitHub repository The-Artificer-of-Ciphers-LLC/skills-from-the-artificer (6 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 101 tokens to every session and 740 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-31.
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