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Elite Principles Skills
Source-grounded engineering personas for coding agents.
This repo turns public engineering philosophies into usable skills: not imitation, not quotes, and not fan-fiction. Each persona is reduced to operational guidance an agent can actually use under pressure: principles, behavioral constraints, and a default execution bias.
Install · Use with Cursor · Examples · Included Personas
Contents
- Elite Principles Skills
Why This Exists
Most persona prompting is shallow. It tends to be biographical, theatrical, or vague enough that it does not change engineering behavior in a reliable way.
This project is trying to do the opposite:
- grounded in public source material,
- focused on engineering decisions rather than personality cosplay,
- designed for real tasks like debugging, API design, rollout planning, refactoring, and code review.
If a claim cannot be defended from public material, it should not be here.
Showcase Prompt
This is the shape of prompt the repo is meant to make possible:
Use `andrej-karpathy`.
Task: Add email validation to the signup form.
Before writing code, surface any ambiguity in the request, define one falsifiable success check, and make the first change as small and testable as possible.
And when a hybrid is actually justified:
Use `kent-beck` + `john-ousterhout`.
Take small safe steps with fast feedback, but keep pushing complexity behind a deeper module boundary instead of leaking bookkeeping to callers.
That is the product: sharper operating bias, not stylistic mimicry.
Included Personas
The personas are grouped by the kind of engineering risk they are best at controlling.
Framing and Execution
andrej-karpathy— ambiguity control, task framing, scope disciplinejohn-carmack— direct implementation, runtime cost visibility, measurementkent-beck— tiny safe steps, feedback loops, reversible change
Correctness and Design
donald-knuth— correctness, invariants, precise reasoningrich-hickey— conceptual simplicity, de-complecting, value-oriented designjohn-ousterhout— deep modules, interface quality, complexity managementsandi-metz— delaying abstraction, truthful code under change
Tools and Runtime Boundaries
rob-pike— regularity, clear flow, low-ceremony toolsjose-valim— explicit boundaries, composable systems, runtime-aware tooling
Operations and Production Reality
charity-majors— observability, production feedback, rollout realism
How To Choose Quickly
Pick the persona that matches the dominant risk in the task.
