cunninghams-law SKILL.md skillA
cunninghams-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.
mdr add the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/cunninghams-law@git:20260530.3e17152Pins 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
cunninghams-law/SKILL.md- Versions recorded
- 1
- Latest version
- git:20260530.3e17152, committed May 30, 2026
- Size
- 3,317 bytes
- Repository stars
- 6
- License
- MIT
Apply Cunningham's Law when someone wants to elicit information, feedback, or corrections from others—especially online. Trigger on phrases like "how do I get people to respond?", "nobody is answering my question", "I want to get feedback on this", or when someone is drafting a question for Stack Overflow, a forum, a team Slack, or a pull request. Also useful when discussing how to get a conversation started or surface hidden knowledge within a team. Cunningham's Law is a surprisingly powerful…
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
# Cunningham's Law > "The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." > — Ward Cunningham, ~1980 (attributed) ## The core idea People are more motivated to correct a wrong statement than to answer an open question. An open question requires someone to do mental work from scratch. A wrong answer hands them something concrete to push against — and people love pushing against wrong things. This is counterintuitive but reliably true. It works in forums, in Slack, in code reviews, in design reviews, and in meetings. ## Why it works - Answering an open question requires generating content from nothing. That's cognitively expensive. - Correcting a wrong answer requires only spotting the error and fixing it. That's easier and, frankly, more satisfying. - There's a social element: correcting someone is a chance to demonstrate knowledge and be helpful simultaneously. - The specificity of a wrong answer gives people a clear target. "Is X the right approach?" generates more engagement than "What approach should I take?" ## How to apply it in practice **Getting answers in forums or Slack:** …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/cunninghams-law@sha256:f263ea87382fa96cThe 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.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_n2klnijpvst363ge)
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.
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 (3317 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_n2klnijpvst363ge GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/cunninghams-law GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/f263ea87382fa96cdb5db81ffac03f5879d4bdd7286fabaa696f383e252d715b
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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