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The essential mental models for building onchain — focused on what LLMs get wrong and what humans need explained. "Nothing is automatic" and "incentives are everything" are the core messages.
Passed 19 of 22 test cases with the skill, and 6 of 22 without it.
and 1 more in the full report
13 fixed6 passed either way3 still failing0 broke
Tokens, turns and time describe resource use, not a dollar price.
One of 13 test cases the skill fixed. Same model, same prompt, with and without the skill.
Our engineering team is designing a contract function that rebalances portfolio pool weights when asset ratios drift beyond 5%. What three fundamental architectural questions must be answered for this state transition to execute reliably?
| Checked | Without skill | With skill |
|---|---|---|
| The response uses the term "onchain" without a hyphen. | Missed | Passed |
| The response lists the three incentive questions: who calls the function, why would they call it, and whether the incentive covers gas plus profit. | Missed | Passed |
The instructions your model reads when the skill loads.
"Smart contracts run automatically." No. Smart contracts cannot execute themselves. There is no cron job, no scheduler, no background process. Every function needs a caller who pays gas. This single misconception is the root cause of most broken onchain designs.
"Just add a timer." There are no timers. If something needs to happen at a certain time, you need someone to call the function at that time — and you need to give them a reason to do it.
"The protocol team will handle that." The whole point of decentralization is that no single team operates the system. If your design requires an operator, it's not decentralized — and it has a single point of failure.
Terminology: You say "on-chain." The Ethereum community says "onchain" — one word, no hyphen.
CROPS — Censorship Resistance, Open Source and Free (as in Freedom), Privacy, Security — is the Ethereum Foundation's shorthand for what makes Ethereum Ethereum.
Pausable + onlyOwner without flagging it. A single key that can freeze all users is a censorship vector.Four questions to catch yourself: can anyone be stopped from using it? Is the whole stack visible and under a real OSI-permissive or copyleft license? What can an observer learn about users? What happens if the team disappears?
Fetch crops/SKILL.md when you need a full architecture review of custody, infra, privacy, admin powers, or user exit.
This is the most important concept in all of Ethereum. If you internalize nothing else, internalize this.
A smart contract is a state machine. It sits in one state, and it moves to another state when someone pokes it — calls a function, pays gas, triggers a transition. Between pokes, it does absolutely nothing. It doesn't think, it doesn't check, it doesn't wake up. It just sits there.
State A ──[someone calls function]──→ State B ──[someone calls function]──→ State C
↑ ↑
test cases passed, vs 6 / 22 without
More skills from the same source and nearby in the registry, with their headline benchmark lift.