Design Canon
Full design-best-practices manual with per-engineer evidence profiles (Hashimoto, Zechner, Ronacher, Dax Raad, Willison). Use when designing architecture, making structural decisions, writing BLUEPRINT.md, or when the user says "design canon" or "check the manual".
Install
$ agentstack add skill-pktikkani-agent-skills-design-canon ✓ scanned · ✓ verified, works with Claude Code, Cursor, and more.
Security review
✓ PassedNo issues found. Passed automated security review. · v0.1.0 How review works →
- ✓ Prompt-injection patterns
- ✓ Secret / credential exfiltration
- ✓ Dangerous shell & filesystem operations
- ✓ Untrusted network calls
- ✓ Known-malicious package signatures
What it can access
- ✓ Network access No
- ✓ Filesystem access No
- ✓ Shell / process execution No
- ✓ Environment & secrets No
- ✓ Dynamic code execution No
From automated source analysis of v0.1.0. “Used” means the capability is present in the source — more access means more to trust, not that it’s unsafe.
Verified badge
Passed review? Show it. Paste this badge into your README, it links to the public security report.
Links to your public security report.[](https://agentstack.voostack.com/security/report/skill-pktikkani-agent-skills-design-canon) Reliability & compatibility
Declared compatibility
Compatibility is declared by the source manifest. End-to-end runtime verification is coming, see below.
We're building live execution health for every listing: tool-call success rate, median latency, uptime, and last-checked timestamps, measured, not self-reported. It isn't live yet, so we don't show numbers we can't stand behind.
How agent discovery & health will work →About
Design canon
The always-on core (~/Documents/design-best-practices.md) carries only the ten convergent laws. This skill is for when a decision needs the full evidence, the reasoning, or a specific engineer's profile.
How to use it
- Read the full manual at
~/Documents/design-best-practices.md
(~1,600 lines — the real manual). Do NOT rely on the distilled core alone for a non-trivial structural decision; the evidence and the anti-patterns are what make the directives actionable.
> Note: the manual itself is a personal document and is not bundled with this > repo. This skill is the navigation contract for it — point it at your own > design-principles document (any long-form manual works) by editing the path above.
- Navigate, don't dump. Read the Meta-principles cheat-sheet first, then jump to
the relevant profile/section for the decision at hand. Each principle is structured identically: principle → why it matters → concrete evidence → "As an agent, you should…" → the anti-pattern it corrects. The profiles:
- Profile 1 — Mitchell Hashimoto (Ghostty, HashiCorp, libxev): engineering
discipline, simplest-correct-first, portable core / platform seam, comptime binding, one typed schema, config as public contract, data structures from access patterns, concurrency (owned config, typed messages, hot-path isolation).
- Profile 2 — Mario Zechner (libGDX, Pi harness): answer-first discipline, terse
prose, read-to-blast-radius, deletion is confirmation-gated, machine-readable rules.
- Profile 3 — Armin Ronacher (Flask, Jinja2, Click, MiniJinja, insta).
- Profile 4 — Dax Raad (SST, opencode).
- Profile 5 — Simon Willison (Django, Datasette, sqlite-utils,
llm): leads with
AI-Assisted Coding — supervise-don't-trust, context-is-king, close-the-loop, save-your-prompts. Read his Section A first if you read only one profile section.
- Apply the relevant profile/section to the decision, cite the specific principle
and its evidence when you justify a design choice, and run the manual's pre-flight checklist before finishing a non-trivial change.
Source & license
This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.
- Author: pktikkani
- Source: pktikkani/agent-skills
- License: MIT
Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.
Reviews
No reviews yet, be the first.
Write a review
Versions
- v0.1.0 Imported from the upstream source.