Open source alternatives to principle-subtract-before-you-add
24 open source AI Skills apps to use instead, best rated first.
Top picks
- G
github-ops
Launchgithub-ops is an agent skill from the ECC collection by affaan-m, listed on skills.sh. It manages a GitHub repository with a focus on community health, CI reliability and the experience of contributors. It covers triaging issues by classify
Open source
- O
opensource-pipeline
Launchopensource-pipeline is an agent skill from the ECC collection by affaan-m, listed on skills.sh. It prepares a private project for safe public release through a three-stage pipeline. The fork stage strips secrets from a copy. The sanitise st
Open source
- A
andrej-karpathy-skills
Launchandrej-karpathy-skills is a single CLAUDE.md file from the multica-ai project that is meant to improve how Claude Code behaves on coding tasks. It is derived from Andrej Karpathy's public observations about LLM coding pitfalls. The file dis
Open source
- M
microsoft/markitdown
Launchmarkitdown-mcp is the MCP server package for MarkItDown, Microsoft's tool for converting many file formats to Markdown for language models. It is a lightweight server that runs over stdio, Streamable HTTP or SSE, and exposes one tool, conve
Open source
- O
od-contribute
Launchod-contribute is an agent skill in the OpenDesign project that provides a guided, one-click contribution flow to the OpenDesign repository, written so that people without a coding background can send a real pull request. It is locked to the
Open source
- G
github-deep-research
Launchgithub-deep-research is an agent skill from the DeerFlow project that researches a single GitHub repository in several rounds and writes a report in Markdown. It is for requests that need more than a README summary, such as a comprehensive
Open source
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by shareAI-lab - A really interesting analysis of how coding agents like Claude
About principle-subtract-before-you-add
principle-subtract-before-you-add
Apply when sequencing an addition, refactor, or rewrite
principle-subtract-before-you-add is an agent skill from Cursor's plugins collection that applies a working principle when a system is being evolved: remove complexity first, then build. It defaults to subtraction and asks that simplification be a continual investment, so that the design is left slightly simpler and more capable behind the same or a smaller public surface than it was found. Before adding a feature, refactor or rewrite, the agent should remove dead code, redundant validators and stub references, and then build on the simpler base. The guidance is to cut before polishing, so the minimum is reached before quality work is invested. It also says to design for observed usage rather than speculative edge cases, to avoid validators, parsers or guards that the specification does not demand, and to simplify prompts by removing redundant instructions and excessive templates. When a reference document has no novel content, the principle says to delete it rather than leave a stub behind. The principle is useful for teams whose codebase has grown by accretion and where each new change adds more code around older code. It is listed on skills.sh, where the page shows install counts and GitHub stars for the Cursor plugins repository, and its Gen Agent Trust Hub, Socket and Snyk audits pass. Install it with npx skills add https://github.com/cursor/plugins --skill principle-subtract-before-you-add.
- Price
- Free
- Made by
- cursor
- Category
- AI Skills
- Website
- github.com/cursor/plugins/principle-subtract-before-you-add