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 cunninghams-lawgit 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/cunninghams-law)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/cunninghams-law"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/cunninghams-law/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/cunninghams-law"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/cunninghams-law.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 | $0.00118 | $0.00667 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00059 | $0.00333 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00024 | $0.00133 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00012 | $0.00067 |
Grade A, and why
cunninghams-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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 50 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Cunningham's Law
"The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." — Ward Cunningham, ~1980 (attributed)
The core idea
People are more motivated to correct a wrong statement than to answer an open question. An open question requires someone to do mental work from scratch. A wrong answer hands them something concrete to push against — and people love pushing against wrong things.
This is counterintuitive but reliably true. It works in forums, in Slack, in code reviews, in design reviews, and in meetings.
Why it works
- Answering an open question requires generating content from nothing. That's cognitively expensive.
- Correcting a wrong answer requires only spotting the error and fixing it. That's easier and, frankly, more satisfying.
- There's a social element: correcting someone is a chance to demonstrate knowledge and be helpful simultaneously.
- The specificity of a wrong answer gives people a clear target. "Is X the right approach?" generates more engagement than "What approach should I take?"
How to apply it in practice
Getting answers in forums or Slack:
Instead of: "Does anyone know how to configure Redis persistence?"
Try: "I'm pretty sure you configure Redis persistence by editing redis.conf and setting appendonly no, right?"
The people who know will correct you immediately — and you'll get a better answer.
In code reviews and design docs: Post a draft with a specific (possibly wrong) implementation choice. People will engage much more energetically with a concrete proposal than with a blank page.
Surfacing team knowledge: If you want to know whether your team has experience with a technology, state a mildly wrong opinion about it: "I don't think anyone here has worked with Kafka before, so we'd be starting from scratch." You'll quickly find out if that's true.
Unsticking a meeting: If a discussion stalls, propose something specific — even a deliberately imperfect proposal — to give people something to react to. Blank-slate brainstorming is hard; critique is easy.
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.
- 12d ago First seen · 50 lines · 118 tokens per session scan A f263ea87382f
cunninghams-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 118 tokens to every session and 667 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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