hyrums-law

hyrums-law is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from The-Artificer-of-Ciphers-LLC/skills-from-the-artificer. It costs 115 tokens per session (841 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A software design rule saying that users may rely on any behavior they can observe, even if it is undocumented or accidental.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when reviewing breaking changes, API versions, deprecations, error messages, response order, timing, or other observable system behavior.
Why use it?
It helps reveal hidden compatibility risks before changing an API or other user-facing behavior.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it when reviewing breaking changes, API versions, deprecations, error messages, response order, timing, or other observable system behavior.

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

README.md
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Your own site
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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.

agentmods 80×15 button for hyrums-law

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/hyrums-law"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/hyrums-law.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 115 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 841 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 $0.00115 $0.00841
Opus 5 $0.00057 $0.00420
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00168
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00084

Measured 12d ago against content hash ee6a096dda4d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hyrums-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.

hyrums-law/SKILL.md · 60 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 60 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Hyrum's Law

"With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody." — Hyrum Wright, 2012

The core idea

If enough people use your API, every behavior — documented or not, intentional or not, even bugs — will be depended upon by someone. Your documented interface is not the real interface. The real interface is everything observable: response times, error message text, ordering of results, whitespace in JSON output, HTTP headers, memory usage patterns.

This has a humbling implication: as an API grows, your ability to change anything without breaking someone approaches zero.

Why it matters

When you're building for a small set of users, you can coordinate changes. When your API is used by thousands of developers, you can't know what they've built. Some of them will have:

  • Parsed your error messages with regex
  • Depended on the alphabetical ordering of a field that you return in hash order
  • Built retry logic around your specific timeout behavior
  • Cached responses based on headers you didn't intend to be cacheable
  • Worked around a bug in a way that breaks when you fix the bug

Real-world examples

  • Python 2→3 migration: even behavior never in the spec was depended on
  • Google's web infrastructure: engineers found users depending on specific memory layouts and response ordering
  • Any bug fix that "breaks" existing users who had worked around it

How to design defensively

Minimize observable surface area. The less you expose, the less gets depended on. Keep internals genuinely internal. Be deliberate about what is observable versus what is an implementation detail.

Version your APIs. Versioning is the escape hatch. When you need to change behavior, version the API and give users a migration path. /v1/ and /v2/ coexist; users migrate on their timeline.

Deprecate slowly and loudly. Give users long warning periods before removing or changing behavior. Emit deprecation warnings in responses. Document the change prominently. Provide migration guides.

Read the full file on GitHub · 60 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 · 60 lines · 115 tokens per session scan A ee6a096dda4d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hyrums-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 115 tokens to every session and 841 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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