aposd-red-flag-review SKILL.md skillA
aposd-red-flag-review 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.
mdr add the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/aposd-red-flag-review@git:20261025.84f93e5Pins git:20261025.84f93e5 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
aposd-red-flag-review/SKILL.md- Versions recorded
- 1
- Latest version
- git:20261025.84f93e5, committed Oct 25, 2026
- Size
- 5,397 bytes
- Repository stars
- 6
- License
- MIT
Review a diff, module, or design for complexity using the red flags from John Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" (2018). Use when asked to review code or a design for maintainability, "is this too complex", "why is this hard to change", "design review", "check for shallow modules", "information leakage", or when a change touches module boundaries, interfaces, or splits one piece of logic into many small classes or steps. Use it even when the user never mentions the book. It audits…
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
# APOSD Red-Flag Review Ousterhout's thesis: complexity is anything in a system's structure that makes it hard to understand or modify. It accumulates in small increments, so review is the cheapest place to stop it. This skill turns the book's diagnostics into a review pass. It is an **audit**: it reads a change and reports. It does not redesign. For redesign, hand off to `codebase-design` (deep-module vocabulary, seam placement, design-it-twice). These are judgment heuristics, not metrics. Report evidence and a confidence, not a score. ## Step 1: Diagnose with the three symptoms Ask of the change (or the area it touches) whether any symptom is present. A symptom with no red flag behind it is still worth reporting. | Symptom | Test | |---|---| | Change amplification | Would a plausible small future change (a new field, a renamed concept) require edits in many places? | | Cognitive load | How much must a reader hold in their head to modify this safely: hidden ordering rules, flags, shared state, special cases? | | Unknown unknowns | Is it unclear what else must change, or what could break? This is the worst symptom because nothing in the code warns you. | …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/aposd-red-flag-review@sha256:f2790b166cdcef9bThe line at the top of this page pins the label git:20261025.84f93e5, 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.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_krpqiwxkxip4hfei)
4 badge image fetches in 30 days. What the badge shows.
Versions
The registry has recorded 1 version of this file, committed on Oct 25, 2026.
Audit of the latest version
- pass: Frontmatter block present
- pass: Frontmatter declares a name
- pass: Frontmatter declares a description
- pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (5397 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
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_krpqiwxkxip4hfei GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/aposd-red-flag-review GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/f2790b166cdcef9b1a7fae2d6ba01849f3f46832d1ac657fcf2d27fa0cc9cd3e
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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