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 zawinskis-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/zawinskis-law)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/zawinskis-law"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/zawinskis-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/zawinskis-law"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/zawinskis-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 | $0.00113 | $0.00959 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00045 | $0.00384 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00023 | $0.00192 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00096 |
Grade A, and why
zawinskis-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 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 — 77 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Zawinski's Law
"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." — Jamie Zawinski, ~1995
The core idea
Software has a natural tendency to expand its feature set over time, acquiring functionality far beyond its original purpose. Zawinski — one of the original Netscape engineers and a key developer of Mozilla — observed this with dark humor: the endpoint of uncontrolled expansion is that every program eventually tries to become an email client (or equivalent communication hub).
The law is both a diagnosis and a warning: feature growth has a logic of its own, and unless deliberately resisted, it tends toward bloat.
Why software expands
User requests accumulate. Users always want more. Every feature request seems individually reasonable. Aggregated over years, they produce a monster.
Competitive pressure. If competitor A adds messaging, product managers feel pressure to add messaging. If competitor B adds file sharing, the feature gets queued. Convergence happens.
Org chart pressure. Teams need to justify their existence. Teams looking for growth opportunities naturally suggest expanding the product's scope.
Platform ambitions. "We don't want to just be a task manager; we want to be a work hub." The aspiration to become a platform drives scope expansion.
Integration demands. Users want their tools to talk to each other. Adding an integration often means absorbing the other tool's functionality.
What Zawinski's Law predicts
Look at the history of major software products:
- Browsers now manage passwords, sync files, send notifications, run applications, and show video
- IDEs have built-in terminals, version control UIs, debuggers, package managers, and chat integrations
- Slack started as team chat and now has video calls, file storage, workflow automation, and app integrations
- Microsoft Teams started as a chat tool and absorbed entire enterprise productivity suites
- iOS and Android started as phone OSes and now manage health, payments, home automation, and more
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 · 77 lines · 113 tokens per session scan A c50f76630fd5
zawinskis-law 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 113 tokens to every session and 959 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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