Four Principles

Four always-on engineering principles the agent applies to every task, not just the big ones.

Why use it

• The agent guesses instead of asking, and picks one reading of an ambiguous request silently.
• It ships 200 lines where 50 would do, and refactors code nobody asked it to touch.
• It says "done" without ever running the check.

What it does

• Think Before Coding: surface assumptions and trade-offs; ask instead of guessing.
• Simplicity First: the minimum that solves the problem; nothing speculative.
• Surgical Changes: every changed line traces to the request; adjacent code stays untouched.
• Goal-Driven Execution: reframe vague asks into checkable ones, then loop until the check passes.

Benefits

• Reviews get fast. Diffs stay small and every line traces to the ask, no archaeology.
• No surprise rewrites. Your untouched code stays untouched.
• "Done" actually means done. Verified, not hoped.
• Drops into any task. One file, every language, zero setup.

Install

Download this skill and copy the four-principles folder to .claude/skills/four-principles/ in your project, or to ~/.claude/skills/four-principles/ to use it in every project. Claude Code finds it on its own; you can also call it with /four-principles.

Part of the Agent Engineering bundle. To get the whole set as a Claude Code plugin: /plugin marketplace add endorphin-ai/hasbrains-agent-kit, then /plugin install agent-engineering@hasbrains-agent-kit.

Source: endorphin-ai/hasbrains-agent-kit. License: MIT.