Home / ganyuanran / aegis · skills/first-principles-review/SKILL.md · GitHub

first-principles-review skillA

first-principles-review is agent-read markdown (skill) from ganyuanran/aegis: Use when asked for first-principles or Occam's-razor review, or when high-risk decisions involve competing constraints, fallback growth, duplicate owners, or architecture direction risk. Ordinary bug fixes stay on the fast path..

Indexed from public GitHub and served as immutable, content-addressed versions. Install it pinned to an exact SHA-256 with the mdr CLI, and every file is verified against the hash recorded here before it reaches your agent. The deterministic audit below grades the latest version, and the same file always earns the same grade.

What the file says

# First Principles Review

## Purpose

Use this as a lightweight decision review before another Aegis workflow makes a
directional choice. It is a compositional skill, not a standalone workflow.

Do not replace `brainstorming`, `systematic-debugging`, `writing-plans`,
`requesting-code-review`, or `verification-before-completion`. Use it to clean
the decision surface those skills will act on.

When this review materially changes the direction, surface `Aegis Visibility`
in natural prose: name the first principle, dropped assumption, smallest
sufficient path, or owner / retirement falsifier that changed the decision.
Keep it advisory and task-specific; do not turn the lens into approval
authority or a generic skill trace.

## Use When

- The user asks for first principles, first-principles thinking, or Occam's
  razor.
- A design, plan, or fix has multiple plausible paths and unclear selection
  criteria.
- The task has ambiguous goals, competing constraints, or product/architecture
  direction risk.
- Debugging is drifting into repeated fixes, fallback growth, duplicate owners,
  consumer-side patches, or "just add another branch" reasoning.
…

Read the whole file at its exact version.

How to install

Latest version
mdr add ganyuanran/aegis/first-principles-review@git:20260905.878cac9
Exact content
mdr add ganyuanran/aegis/first-principles-review@sha256:6ca49ee3e0bd44e9

Pin to a label to follow the author's releases, or to a sha256 to freeze the exact bytes forever. Either way the resolved hash is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install reproduces it on any machine.

Badge

mdr badge

[![mdr](https://markdownregistry.com/badge/art_d6xbjl2wx6roh2hm.svg)](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_d6xbjl2wx6roh2hm)

1 badge views in 30 days

Versions

versioncommittedcommitsizeaudit
git:20260905.878cac9 latest2026-09-05 878cac9 9,940 BA view · diff
git:20260901.e71b85a2026-09-01 e71b85a 8,481 BA view · diff
git:20260830.8e0cee32026-08-30 8e0cee3 8,222 BA view · diff
git:20260823.4a281c22026-08-23 4a281c2 7,272 BA view · diff
git:20260809.f62395b2026-08-09 f62395b 6,975 BA view

Audit of the latest version

A  17 of 17 checks passed. Deterministic, no model, same answer every run.
  • pass: Frontmatter block present
  • pass: Frontmatter declares a name
  • pass: Frontmatter declares a description
  • pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (9940 bytes)
  • pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
  • pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
  • pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
  • pass: No credential-shaped string
  • pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
  • pass: No text hidden with inline styles
  • pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
  • pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
  • pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
  • pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
  • pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
  • pass: No link to a raw IP address
  • pass: No script tag

Source

GitHub

ganyuanran/aegis · 1,280 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-09-24 · branch main

API

GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_d6xbjl2wx6roh2hm
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=ganyuanran/aegis/first-principles-review
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/6ca49ee3e0bd44e9b6fa98ef3af1cf43c38af99c34895b9fe02ce8d29d969e90

Your agent does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.

More from ganyuanran/aegis

AGENTS.md agents
ganyuanran/aegis · AGENTS.md
git:20260813.0c73270 · audit A · 1,280 stars
CLAUDE.md claude
ganyuanran/aegis · CLAUDE.md
git:20260813.0c73270 · audit A · 1,280 stars
anti-entropy-governance skill
ganyuanran/aegis · skills/anti-entropy-governance/SKILL.md · Use when touching retiring old logic, collapsing duplicate owners, removing fallbacks, or…
git:20260830.8e0cee3 · audit A · 1,280 stars
brainstorming skill
ganyuanran/aegis · skills/brainstorming/SKILL.md · Use when defining ambiguous or high-complexity new features, product behavior, UI/component design, architecture…
git:20260916.9a51c7a · audit A · 1,280 stars
communicating-concisely skill
ganyuanran/aegis · skills/communicating-concisely/SKILL.md · Use when the user asks for caveman mode, fewer tokens, brief responses, compressed communication, or otherwise…
git:20260723.88b8ec9 · audit A · 1,280 stars
dispatching-parallel-agents skill
ganyuanran/aegis · skills/dispatching-parallel-agents/SKILL.md · Use when facing 2+ independent tasks without a written plan, with no conflicting shared mutable state or sequential…
git:20260920.8265b5c · audit A · 1,280 stars
establishing-project-context skill
ganyuanran/aegis · skills/establishing-project-context/SKILL.md · Use when the user asks to establish shared project language, or project work exposes a conflicting, renamed, or…
git:20260809.f62395b · audit A · 1,280 stars
executing-plans skill
ganyuanran/aegis · skills/executing-plans/SKILL.md · Use when executing a written implementation plan across sessions or with review checkpoints. Small or single-slice…
git:20260828.f7ae3a7 · audit A · 1,280 stars
finishing-a-development-branch skill
ganyuanran/aegis · skills/finishing-a-development-branch/SKILL.md · Use when verified work needs integration or cleanup of an existing task-created branch/worktree, or the user explicitly…
git:20260809.f62395b · audit A · 1,280 stars
goal-framing skill
ganyuanran/aegis · skills/goal-framing/SKILL.md · Use when the user explicitly sets an Aegis goal with /aegis-goal, Aegis goal:, or asks to define goal, success…
git:20260723.88b8ec9 · audit A · 1,280 stars
long-task-continuation skill
ganyuanran/aegis · skills/long-task-continuation/SKILL.md · Use when a task is multi-step, may span context resets or sessions, uses subagents, or risks losing state before…
git:20260916.9a51c7a · audit A · 1,280 stars
receiving-code-review skill
ganyuanran/aegis · skills/receiving-code-review/SKILL.md · Use when receiving code review feedback before implementing suggestions, especially when feedback is unclear, risky…
git:20260723.88b8ec9 · audit A · 1,280 stars

Every file in ganyuanran/aegis

Browse by kind, by grade A, or by owner.