Home / the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc / skills-from-the-artificer · GitHub

zawinskis-law SKILL.md skillA

zawinskis-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/zawinskis-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: zawinskis-law/SKILL.md
Versions recorded: 1
Latest version: git:20260530.3e17152, committed May 30, 2026
Size: 4,729 bytes
Repository stars: 6
License: MIT

Apply Zawinski's Law when discussing feature creep, scope expansion, the tendency for software to grow beyond its original purpose, or when evaluating whether to add a communication feature to a non-communication product. Trigger on phrases like "should we add messaging?", "every app becomes a platform", "our product is becoming too broad", "why does this tool have so many features?", "feature creep", or any discussion about the pressure on software to expand into adjacent functionality.…

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

# 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.
…

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/zawinskis-law@sha256:c50f76630fd54a20

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_sxjzlljacilg7i2r.svg)](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_sxjzlljacilg7i2r)

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	4,729 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 (4729 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_sxjzlljacilg7i2r
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/zawinskis-law
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/c50f76630fd54a2074fce81634221cb144f05dddad1fd971f09c0ceba3618fc5

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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