conways-law

conways-law is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from The-Artificer-of-Ciphers-LLC/skills-from-the-artificer. It costs 107 tokens per session (760 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A software architecture principle stating that a system’s structure tends to mirror how the organization building it communicates. Teams that coordinate closely usually create tighter boundaries than teams that rarely interact.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when splitting systems into services, assigning API ownership, resolving team boundaries, planning migrations, or redesigning how engineering teams work together.
Why use it?
It explains why service boundaries and interfaces often reflect team ownership and communication. This helps reveal organizational causes of architectural friction.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it when splitting systems into services, assigning API ownership, resolving team boundaries, planning migrations, or redesigning how engineering teams work together.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/conways-law
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.

Any agent
npx skills add The-Artificer-of-Ciphers-LLC/skills-from-the-artificer --skill conways-law
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/The-Artificer-of-Ciphers-LLC/skills-from-the-artificer

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote 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.

agentmods badge for conways-law

README.md
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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.

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Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/conways-law"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/conways-law.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 107 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 760 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00107 $0.00760
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.00380
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00152
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00076

Measured 12d ago against content hash 515a19c638e1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

conways-law 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 12d 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.

conways-law/SKILL.md · 59 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 59 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Conway's Law

"Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure." — Melvin Conway, 1968

The core idea

Conway observed that the architecture of a software system will mirror the communication structure of the team that built it. If you have three teams, you'll probably end up with a three-tier system. If two teams don't talk much, the interface between their systems will be poorly defined and brittle. This isn't a choice — it's an emergent property of how organizations work.

This isn't a bug to fix. It's a force to work with.

Why it matters

  • Org structure drives architecture more than technical decisions do. The seams in your software tend to appear where the seams in your org appear.
  • Communication overhead is the bottleneck. Dense, constant communication produces tightly integrated systems. Sparse communication produces loosely coupled systems. Neither is universally good — it depends on what you're building.
  • Migrations are org problems, not just tech problems. If you want to decouple a monolith into microservices, you probably also need to change how your teams are structured.

The Inverse Conway Maneuver

Once you accept Conway's Law, you can use it intentionally. The Inverse Conway Maneuver is: design your team structure to match the architecture you want.

If you want a clean boundary between billing and user management, put those on separate teams with limited shared meetings. If you want tight integration between two services, put those engineers on the same team. The communication structure will do a lot of the architectural work for you.

How to apply it

Diagnosing architectural problems:

  • When a system feels messy or tightly coupled in the wrong places, look at the org chart. Who talks to whom? The coupling often matches.
  • When interfaces are poorly designed, ask: did the teams that own them ever really collaborate?

Read the full file on GitHub · 59 lines

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. 12d ago First seen · 59 lines · 107 tokens per session scan A 515a19c638e1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

conways-law is a skill published in the GitHub repository The-Artificer-of-Ciphers-LLC/skills-from-the-artificer (4 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 107 tokens to every session and 760 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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