first-principles-review
Use when explicitly asked for first-principles or Occam's-razor review, or when complex decisions involve competing constraints, repeated fixes, fallback growth, duplicate owners, or architecture/product direction risk.
npx skills add GanyuanRan/Aegis --skill first-principles-review --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# First Principles Review ## Purpose Use this as a lightweight decision review before another Aegis workflow makes a directional choice. It is a compositional skill, not a standalone workflow. Do not replace `brainstorming`, `systematic-debugging`, `writing-plans`, `requesting-code-review`, or `verification-before-completion`. Use it to clean the decision surface those skills will act on. When this review materially changes the direction, surface `Aegis Visibility` in natural prose: name the first principle, dropped assumption, smallest sufficient path, or owner / retirement falsifier that changed the decision. Keep it advisory and task-specific; do not turn the lens into approval authority or a generic skill trace. ## Use When - The user asks for first principles, first-principles thinking, or Occam's razor. - A design, plan, or fix has multiple plausible paths and unclear selection criteria. - The task has ambiguous goals, competing constraints, or product/architecture direction risk. - Debugging is drifting into repeated fixes, fallback growth, duplicate owners, consumer-side patches, or "just add another branch" reasoning. - A review finds that the implementation may be locally
- Purpose
- Use When
- Do Not Use
- Five-Line Review
- Decision Hygiene Review
- Architecture Integrity Lens
- Composition
- Boundaries
What does the first-principles-review skill do?
Use when explicitly asked for first-principles or Occam's-razor review, or when complex decisions involve competing constraints, repeated fixes, fallback growth, duplicate owners, or architecture/product direction risk.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add GanyuanRan/Aegis --skill first-principles-review --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From GanyuanRan/Aegis, a repository with 902 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.