first-principles-thinking SKILL.md skillA
first-principles-thinking from hraness/personal-monorepo-template is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.
mdr add hraness/personal-monorepo-template/first-principles-thinking@git:20260813.224f50fPins git:20260813.224f50f in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.
- Audit grade
- A, 17 of 17 checks passed
- Kind
- SKILL.md skill
- Repository
- hraness/personal-monorepo-template
- Path
.agents/skills/first-principles-thinking/SKILL.md- Versions recorded
- 1
- Latest version
- git:20260813.224f50f, committed Aug 13, 2026
- Size
- 2,506 bytes
- Repository stars
- 4
- License
- MIT
Use first-principles thinking as a tool for any question, design problem, strategy, decision, or explanation where the user wants to reason from fundamentals instead of analogy, convention, or inherited assumptions.
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
# First-Principles Thinking Use this skill when a question would benefit from stripping away assumptions and rebuilding the answer from fundamentals. ## Purpose First-principles thinking decomposes a problem into the most basic truths, constraints, mechanisms, or goals that are hard to reduce further. It is useful when conventional answers may be stale, copied, cargo-culted, or overly constrained by analogy. ## Procedure 1. State the question or problem plainly. 2. List the current assumptions, conventions, analogies, or inherited defaults. 3. Separate what must be true from what is merely customary. 4. Identify the irreducible fundamentals: - physical constraints - economic constraints - human needs or incentives - technical primitives - logical requirements - legal or ethical boundaries 5. Rebuild possible answers from those fundamentals. 6. Compare the rebuilt answer against the conventional answer. 7. Name the practical implication, tradeoff, or experiment. ## Output format Use this concise structure unless the user asks otherwise: ```markdown ## Problem ... ## Assumptions to question - ... ## First principles - ... ## Rebuilt answer ... …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add hraness/personal-monorepo-template/first-principles-thinking@sha256:e915fe5d6f10e488The line at the top of this page pins the label git:20260813.224f50f, 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_zsfuiozshcnxuy43)
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Versions
The registry has recorded 1 version of this file, committed on Aug 13, 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 (2506 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
hraness/personal-monorepo-template · 4 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-10-13 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_zsfuiozshcnxuy43 GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=hraness/personal-monorepo-template/first-principles-thinking GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/e915fe5d6f10e48852ce3ffdcf398385f96ebdbc8c418ebd7ad70fd8bb89537a
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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