Agent Skill
The Pragmatic Programmer skill
the-pragmatic-programmerciembor/agent-rules-booksthe-pragmatic-programmer/SKILL.md
Apply Hunt and Thomas-inspired pragmatic programming rules when improving engineering judgment, feedback loops, DRY knowledge, orthogonality, automation, or adaptability.
always on
36 tokname + description
once used
111 tokSKILL.md body
bundled files
322 KB
repo stars
3.1kGitHub
Install the The Pragmatic Programmer skill
Skills CLI (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and others)
npx skills add https://github.com/ciembor/agent-rules-books --skill the-pragmatic-programmer
Claude Code, by hand (all projects)
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ciembor/agent-rules-books.git /tmp/agent-rules-books mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills cp -R /tmp/agent-rules-books/the-pragmatic-programmer ~/.claude/skills/the-pragmatic-programmer
For one project only, copy the folder into .claude/skills/ in that project instead. The agent picks it up when a task matches its description.
What it costs your context
Agent Skills load in three steps. Tokens counted with the o200k tokenizer; your model's count will differ a little.
| When | What loads | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Every session | Name and description | 36 tok |
| When the agent uses it | The SKILL.md instructions | 111 tok |
| Only if opened | 3 bundled files (22 KB) | varies |
Until it is used, the-pragmatic-programmer costs about 38× less than the median MCP server we measured (1,363 tokens on every turn). Installing all 14 skills from ciembor/agent-rules-books would load 438 tokens of descriptions. Skills vs MCP study
Checks
Our checks found nothing to flag: it follows the Agent Skills specification's naming and size guidelines and doesn't pipe downloads into a shell.
Checked 2026-10-22 · method
What's inside
The headings of its SKILL.md. Read the full file on GitHub.
- The Pragmatic Programmer Skill
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