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kernighans-law SKILL.md skillA

kernighans-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/kernighans-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: kernighans-law/SKILL.md
Versions recorded: 1
Latest version: git:20260530.3e17152, committed May 30, 2026
Size: 3,874 bytes
Repository stars: 6
License: MIT

Apply Kernighan's Law when reviewing code, discussing code complexity, advising on coding style, or coaching developers on how to write maintainable code. Trigger on phrases like "this clever solution", "I wrote a really elegant piece of code", "look at this one-liner", "why is this code hard to debug?", or any situation involving the trade-off between cleverness and clarity. Also trigger when someone is struggling to debug complex code or asking whether a clever approach is worth the cost.

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

# Kernighan's Law

> "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"
> — Brian Kernighan, 1974 (The Elements of Programming Style)

## The core idea

Writing clever code feels good. It demonstrates mastery and intelligence. But if you write code at the absolute limit of your ability to understand, you have no margin left to debug it when something goes wrong — and something will always go wrong.

The smarter move is to write code that is simpler than you're capable of. Leave yourself headroom.

## What "clever" code actually costs

**Time to understand:** Code that is dense, abstract, or uses advanced tricks is hard to read — for you, six months later, and especially for colleagues.

**Debugging difficulty:** When clever code breaks, the same cleverness that makes it compact also makes the failure mode opaque. You have to fully reconstruct the intent before you can find the bug.

**Review friction:** Code reviewers who don't immediately understand code are slower and less thorough. Bugs slip through.
…

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/kernighans-law@sha256:1d2e70c19472f99d

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_wph34nio3ondqzfp.svg)](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_wph34nio3ondqzfp)

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	3,874 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 (3874 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_wph34nio3ondqzfp
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/kernighans-law
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/1d2e70c19472f99d0af9e9a7660cf8f39060ea70d47283bb42c8f589c93749be

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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