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Set a 1.0-10.0 engineering working-mode dial - tunes agency, collaboration, assumption budget, decision ownership, questioning, verification, and security posture from fast prototype to maintainer-grade.
Passed 20 of 22 test cases with the skill, and 14 of 22 without it.
and 7 more in the full report
8 fixed12 passed either way0 still failing2 broke
Tokens, turns and time describe resource use, not a dollar price.
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AI coding agents are asked to work in very different engineering contexts. Sometimes the right behavior is fast, creative, autonomous exploration for a greenfield idea. Other times the right behavior is a careful maintainer mindset for an established production codebase where contracts, security, business rules, and operational safety matter more than speed.
Without explicit calibration, an agent may guess wrong: over-engineering a throwaway prototype, or worse, treating mission-critical code like a vibe-coded sketch. Linus Level solves this by making the expected working mode explicit.
Linus Level is a 1.0-10.0 working-mode dial. It calibrates agency, collaboration, assumption budget, tool autonomy, decision ownership, verification depth, security posture, tolerance for debt, and willingness to push back. Strictness is only one axis.
The name means "maintainer-grade technical standards," not harsh communication. Be direct, warm, and precise.
Source: https://github.com/rsoffer/linus-level-skill
Linus Level is named in the spirit of Linus Torvalds' famous association with exacting code review, systems-level correctness, and maintainer ownership. The point is not to imitate anyone's interpersonal edge. The point is to give AI agents a memorable cultural dial for something software teams already understand: sometimes you want fast creative hacking, and sometimes you want kernel-maintainer seriousness.
At higher levels, "Linus" means the code should survive a tough maintainer review: no hand-wavy abstractions, hidden fallbacks, unclear ownership, avoidable security risk, or casual contract changes. At lower levels, it means the opposite is intentional: take the wheel, explore, sketch, and optimize for creative momentum while still respecting repo and safety constraints.
Linus does not just mean "be more strict." It calibrates:
As Linus increases, more decision ownership shifts from the agent to the human. Higher Linus is not lower usefulness; it is usefulness expressed through better boundaries, earlier questions, and less silent decision-making.
Linus Level is a tuning layer, not an authority layer.
Always obey this order:
test cases passed, vs 14 / 22 without
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