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Occam

简体中文 · English

skills.sh GitHub release License: MIT

若无必要,勿增实体。

Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.

Agents rarely fail only because they cannot produce enough. They also fail because they produce too much: too many assumptions, layers, dependencies, options, files, steps, and words.

Occam is an explicitly invoked Agent Skill that applies Occam's razor to the whole task. It does not merely shorten the final answer. It asks the agent to find the simplest trustworthy solution that fully satisfies the goal, then execute and verify that solution without adding accidental complexity.

Complexity may be necessary. Excess is not.

The discipline

Occam makes the agent follow one decision rule:

Among solutions that are equally sufficient and trustworthy, choose the one with the lowest total lifecycle complexity.

That requires more than counting components or lines of code. A solution is not simpler when it moves complexity into hidden assumptions, manual operations, fragile behavior, future maintenance, or recovery from errors.

When invoked, Occam directs the agent to:

  1. Establish the goal, hard constraints, authority boundaries, and acceptable risk.
  2. Treat suggested methods as hypotheses unless the user made them explicit requirements.
  3. Prefer direct paths, existing mechanisms, minimal complete changes, and reversible actions.
  4. Preserve necessary correctness, safety, approvals, verification, and rollback protection.
  5. Deliver only the information needed to understand the result, decide, and act.

If the goal is already satisfied, doing nothing is a valid result. If a small amount of complexity substantially reduces risk, it belongs in the solution.

Install

npx skills add youaifuou/occam --skill occam

Invoke

Occam runs only when you call it explicitly:

$occam Design the simplest trustworthy deployment for this service.
$occam Add CSV export without expanding the project beyond the requirement.
$occam Turn these findings into the decision the reader actually needs to make.

Occam can be layered with a domain Skill. The domain Skill supplies the necessary expertise and workflow; Occam constrains unnecessary complexity.

$occam $pdf Extract the required form fields and produce the smallest complete deliverable.

What Occam is not

Occam is not a word-count limiter, a shortcut around verification, or a license to ignore edge cases. It does not make every task small. It makes the solution no larger than the task requires.

The Skill intentionally remains a short, high-freedom prompt rather than a catalog of rules for every task type. Its internal loop is:

define sufficiency
→ find the simplest solution
→ test whether it is oversimplified
→ execute
→ verify
→ remove what remains unnecessary

Repository

occam/
  SKILL.md
  agents/
    openai.yaml

License

Occam is released under the MIT License.

About

An explicitly invoked Agent Skill for complete work and minimal sufficient communication.

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