“Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.”
— Benjamin Franklin

benjamin-plus

A token-efficiency skill for coding agents.
It changes how the agent looks things up and waits — never what it builds.

Measured: up to −18 % cost and −22 % tokens per task, quality unchanged.

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What the skill teaches

An agent pays twice for every clumsy lookup: once for the step itself, and again every time the growing conversation gets re-read. So the skill teaches five habits:

1. Recon in one pass. Gather the facts up front in one combined step instead of poking at the repo five separate times. And before copying a format or convention, look at two real examples, not one.
2. Keyhole reads. When the agent only needs to see something, it reads 50 lines, not the whole file. Data it will actually transform is never truncated.
3. Probe the environment once. Check every dependency in one command and install whatever is missing in one go, instead of discovering them one crash at a time.
4. Green means the task's own check. If the task says how to verify, that command is the definition of done. A missing compiler is still the agent's problem to fix, and a check that fails twice means the approach is wrong, not the symptom. When it passes: stop.
5. Polling is a step. A build that hasn't finished has nothing new to say. Check on it every 30 seconds, not every second. On some agent platforms, polling alone turned out to be nearly half of all steps.

The skill's full text: [`RULESET.md`](RULESET.md) (~745 tokens injected).

What to expect



• Quality unchanged. 7 better / 5 worse / 6