Job in Primitives Agent Skill

Reduces a job to its three irreducible currencies — information moved, decisions made, liability transferred — after deleting every tool…

Context cost
9.3k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
13 files · 37.3 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
Apache-2.0the author’s own terms
Last change
—no release on file
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Reduces a job to its three irreducible currencies — information moved, decisions made, liability transferred — after deleting every tool, vendor, product, and org-chart role name from the description. Fires on "what job is really being done here", "strip this down to the primitive", "what's the primitive job", "take the tool names out and tell me the underlying job", or when a fellow describes a workflow thick with product and team names and wants the tool-independent job beneath it.

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

productivity

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md10.6 kB · preview
--- name: job-in-primitives type: generator supersedes: none ---
7# Job in Primitives
8
9## What it does
10Takes a job described in the customer's own language — full of product names, team names, and steps — and reduces it to the three things every job actually is underneath: information moved, decisions made, liability transferred. It first strips every proper noun, then fills those three lines in tool-free language, then checks with an invariance test (would the line still be true if every named tool vanished?). The output is a filled primitive job spec ([template.md](template.md)) that names, separately, what AI can eat, where the wedge is, and which primitive can never move to a machine. It finds the job that survives when the tools change.
11
12## The Icarus reframe
13The customer's words encode the customer's current solution. "We need the risk report faster" hides that the report is one implementation of "move a risk judgment to an insurer who will pay on it." Keep the vendor words and you rebuild their tool; delete them and you can rebuild the job. Underneath, every job is some mix of three currencies — information moved, decisions made, liability transferred — and AI meets them very differently: it eats information movement, it eats the routine half of decisions, and it structurally cannot take liability, because a model has no name to stake, no licence to lose, no way to be prosecuted. So the reduction is not tidy framing. It is a map of what the machine eats and what stays yours. If a tool, vendor, or role name survives the reduction, you have not found the primitive yet — you have restated the workflow.
14
15## When to use / When NOT
16Use it at the very start, on a job you can describe concretely from a real instance, when you want the tool-independent version before anyone designs a solution.
17
18| Situation | Use this? | Go to |
19|---|---|---|
20| "What job is really being done under all these tools?" | Yes | job-in-primitives |
21| "Strip this workflow down to the primitive." | Yes | job-in-primitives |
22| "Take the product/team names out — what's the underlying job?" | Yes | job-in-primitives |
23| "State this as the one decision we're changing, and how much faster it gets." | No | product-as-decision |
24| "Map how it's done today and price every step." | No | current-state-map |
25| "What's the riskiest assumption / how would I disprove it?" | No | null-hypothesis-test |
26| "Is the whole idea any good?" | No | so-what-stress-test |
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md1,774 words
Files13
LicenceApache-2.0
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈250
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
9,075
on trigger
The instruction body and 12 supporting files, read only when the skill fires.
4.7%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 47% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

9.3k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Heavy. Teams tend to install this one per project rather than globally, and load it only when the job comes up.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

13 files, 37.3 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md10.6 kB
  • template.md4.2 kB
  • examples/sample.md5.0 kB
  • tests/RESULTS.md5.5 kB
  • tests/rubric.json1.1 kB
  • tests/adversarial/01.md0.9 kB
  • tests/adversarial/02.md1.0 kB
  • tests/adversarial/03.md1.0 kB
  • tests/golden/01.md1.7 kB
  • tests/golden/02.md1.5 kB
  • tests/golden/03.md1.5 kB
  • tests/golden/04.md1.6 kB
  • tests/golden/05.md1.7 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 13 files you can review in full before installing. The Apache-2.0 licence covers the templates and examples as well as the instructions.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Job in Primitives · 9.3k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/job-in-primitives/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/job-in-primitives" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/job-in-primitives ] || { mv .claude/skills/job-in-primitives "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/job-in-primitives" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/job-in-primitives"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add the-utopia-studio/job-in-primitives

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/job-in-primitives/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/job-in-primitives/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/job-in-primitives" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/job-in-primitives ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/job-in-primitives "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/job-in-primitives" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/job-in-primitives" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/job-in-primitives/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Versionnot versioned
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencethe-utopia-studio/job-in-primitives

Versions

Its author publishes no version number, so there is nothing here to pin to: what you install is the folder as it stands today. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

Pinning

Nothing to pin to: this skill carries no version number of its own. What you install is what the folder holds on the day you install it.

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