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 wirths-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/wirths-law)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/wirths-law"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/wirths-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/wirths-law"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/wirths-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 | $0.00098 | $0.00851 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00049 | $0.00426 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00020 | $0.00170 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00085 |
Grade A, and why
wirths-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 — 61 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Wirth's Law
"Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster." — Niklaus Wirth, 1995
The core idea
Moore's Law gives hardware a doubling of capability roughly every two years. Wirth's Law observes a counteracting trend: software grows in size, complexity, and resource consumption at a rate that outpaces — or at least keeps pace with — hardware improvements. The result: users often don't experience the performance gains that Moore's Law would suggest they should.
A more colorful formulation is "Andy and Bill's Law" (from the industry): "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away" — referring to Intel's Andy Grove and Microsoft's Bill Gates. Every gain in hardware capability gets absorbed by software demanding more.
Why software grows slower
Abstraction layers accumulate. Modern applications run on layer after layer of abstraction: operating system, runtime, virtual machine, framework, library, application. Each layer has overhead. The early app that ran directly on hardware is now wrapped in multiple interpreters and runtimes.
Developer time is expensive; compute is cheap. As hardware got cheaper, the economic incentive shifted from "write efficient code" to "write code faster." Higher-level languages, garbage collection, dynamic typing, interpreted execution — all trade runtime performance for developer productivity. Rational choice, but the cumulative effect is significant resource consumption.
Feature creep. Software adds features over time. More features mean more code, more memory, more processing. An application from 2005 was much simpler than its 2025 descendant.
"Hardware will compensate" thinking. Developers (reasonably) assume users will have faster hardware than they currently do. This justifies shortcuts and inefficiencies that accumulate over generations of software.
Electron and similar frameworks. Shipping a full browser engine with every desktop application is a vivid example: a simple notes app now requires hundreds of megabytes and significant RAM because it's built on a web rendering engine.
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 · 61 lines · 98 tokens per session scan A 91cfde08fe59
wirths-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 98 tokens to every session and 851 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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