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goodharts-law SKILL.md skillA

goodharts-law from the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.

Install it, pinned

mdr add the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/goodharts-law@git:20260530.3e17152

Pins git:20260530.3e17152 in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.

Audit grade: A, 17 of 17 checks passed
Kind: SKILL.md skill
Repository: the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer
Path: goodharts-law/SKILL.md
Versions recorded: 1
Latest version: git:20260530.3e17152, committed May 30, 2026
Size: 3,673 bytes
Repository stars: 6
License: MIT

Apply Goodhart's Law when designing metrics, OKRs, KPIs, performance reviews, engineering productivity measures, or any system where people are evaluated by a number. Trigger on phrases like "how should we measure this?", "our metrics aren't capturing what we want", "people are gaming the metric", "velocity doesn't feel like a real measure of progress", or any situation where a measurement has become a target. Goodhart's Law is critical for anyone designing incentive systems or interpreting…

Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.

What the file says

# Goodhart's Law

> "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
> — Charles Goodhart, 1975 (popularized by Marilyn Strathern)

## The core idea

The moment you tell people they'll be evaluated by a number, they start optimizing for that number — often in ways that are disconnected from, or actively harmful to, the underlying goal the number was meant to represent.

This isn't because people are bad. It's because optimizing for a proxy is easier and more legible than optimizing for the underlying reality.

## Classic examples in software

| What you measure | What gets gamed |
|---|---|
| Lines of code written | Verbose, redundant code |
| Bugs closed | Bugs closed without fixing, or marked as duplicates |
| Velocity (story points) | Points inflated per story |
| Test coverage % | Trivial tests that don't assert anything meaningful |
| PR count | Many tiny, low-value PRs |
| Support tickets resolved | Quick closes without real resolution |
| Time to first response | Auto-responses that count as "responses" |

## Why it happens
…

Read the whole file at its exact version.

How to install

The exact contents, by fingerprint

mdr add the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/goodharts-law@sha256:28aba339bd985104

The line at the top of this page pins the label git:20260530.3e17152, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.

Badge

[![mdr](https://markdownregistry.com/badge/art_de7tdtbghsbvcaqy.svg)](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_de7tdtbghsbvcaqy)

4 badge image fetches in 30 days. What the badge shows.

Versions

The registry has recorded 1 version of this file, committed on May 30, 2026.

version	committed	commit	size	audit
git:20260530.3e17152 latest	2026-05-30	3e17152	3,673 B	A	view

Audit of the latest version

A 17 of 17 checks passed. Fixed automatic checks with no AI involved, so the same checks give the 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 (3673 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

the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer · 6 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-11-08 · branch main

API

GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_de7tdtbghsbvcaqy
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/goodharts-law
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/28aba339bd985104f306edebfcbd4a9b1ab28882c3d43dbfe4c4b01287f413f6

Your AI assistant 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.

Guides: the SKILL.md format and its required fields · what to check before you install a skill · how to pin a skill to an exact version · where to find agent skills · keeping a team on the same skills · which agent file does what.

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