97

Your agent, on the shoulders of giants.

Early beta. Works on Claude Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, and OpenCode.

Install · What's inside · FAQ · Credits · Development

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What this is

Skills your coding agent invokes when they apply: when it's about to refactor, write a test, design an API, or commit. They distill established programming practice like Fowler on refactoring smells, 12-factor on configuration and deploys, Ousterhout and Liskov on API shape and design, and others.

The project is named for 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know (O'Reilly, ed. Kevlin Henney) and built in its spirit: one principle at a time, applied at the moment of decision. Every principle ships with attribution to the original author. Principles are chosen to be language-agnostic and outlast specific frameworks or stacks.

Install

Works on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Node 18+.

Three supported harnesses. Pick the one you use.

Claude Code

/plugin marketplace add oribarilan/97
/plugin install 97@97-marketplace

Updates ship via the marketplace; run /plugin update 97 when a new version is available.

GitHub Copilot CLI

copilot plugin marketplace add oribarilan/97
copilot plugin install 97@97-marketplace

Updates ship via the marketplace; run copilot plugin update 97 when a new version is available.

OpenCode

Add to your OpenCode config file.

{
  "plugin": [
    "97@git+https://github.com/oribarilan/97.git"
  ]
}

Restart OpenCode. The plugin pulls the latest commit on each restart.

Advanced: pinned install

For reproducible behavior across sessions, pin to a specific tag (#vX.Y.Z):

{
  "plugin": [
    "97@git+https://github.com/oribarilan/97.git#v0.5.0"
  ]
}

What's inside

Skill	When it fires
using-97	Always — bootstrap that primes the agent on the trigger map
before-you-refactor	About to refactor, restructure, rename across files, or "clean up" existing code
writing-clean-code	Adding a new function/class, naming a new entity, or modifying ≥3 lines of non-trivial logic
domain-modeling	Introducing a new top-level type/table/domain concept, renaming a domain concept, or deciding where state lives
api-and-interface-design	Designing a public API, function signature, module boundary, exported type, or any contract other code depends on
testing-discipline	Writing tests, designing test data, naming a test, choosing what to assert, or writing test helpers/mocks/fixtures
error-and-correctness-traps	Writing error handling, comparing/calculating with floats, writing concurrent code, calling a remote process, adding a singleton, choosing a data structure for a hot path, or changing log statements
security-and-trust-boundaries	Parsing user input, writing SQL or shell commands, handling secrets/tokens, hashing passwords, adding/changing an auth check, deserializing untrusted data, or constructing file paths/URLs from input
observability	Adding a request handler, RPC, or background job that will run in production; adding tracing, metrics, or structured-log calls; or making cross-process diagnosability decisions
build-deploy-and-tooling	Authoring/changing build scripts, CI workflows, deploy pipelines, repo setup, or evaluating a new tool for adoption
pre-commit-self-review	About to commit, finish a task, open a PR, summarize work, or when asked for a review or hand-off
working-with-users-and-team	Gathering or interpreting requirements, estimating effort, or communicating with stakeholders about what to build

12 skills total (the bootstrap plus 11 themed skills). Every principle is cited and attributed in the skill's principles.md.

Giants

Every principle the agent applies is attributed to its original author. Each skill ships a principles.md next to its SKILL.md with, per principle: the author, a link to the source (CC-BY-3.0 essay, book chapter, RFC, or specification as appropriate), our distillation in our own words, and how the agent applies it.

The sources currently cited:

• 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know — Kevlin Henney (ed.) and contributors. Namesake; principles across most skills.
• Martin Fowler — Refactoring. Code smells (Long Method, Primitive Obsession, and others).
• Scott Wlaschin — Domain Modeling Made Functional. Make invalid states unrepresentable.
• Michael Nygard — Release It! Stability patterns (circuit breaker, timeout, bulkhead, and others).
• Adam Wiggins — The Twelve-Factor App. Config in the environment, build/release/run separation, and other deploy hygiene.
• Jez Humble & David Farley — Continuous Delivery. Pipeline as code.
• Steve Freeman & Nat Pryce — Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests. Listen to test pain.
• Gerard Meszaros — xUnit Test Patterns. Test smells (mystery guest, fragile test, and others).
• John Ousterhout — A Philosophy of Software Design. Deep modules; define errors out of existence.
• Barbara Liskov — the Liskov Substitution Principle.
• Alexis King — Parse, Don't Validate.
• Google SRE — Site Reliability Engineering. The four golden signals.
• OpenTelemetry / W3C — Trace Context, structured-log conventions.
• Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones, George Miranda — Observability Engineering. Cardinality discipline.

You can ask the agent at any time: "Who wrote the principle you just applied, and why does it say what it says?" The agent will open the relevant principles.md and tell you who wrote it, link the source, and explain the reasoning. Treat 97 as a guided reading list into the underlying literature as much as a behavior plugin.

The security-and-trust-boundaries and observability skills are mostly original commentary on sources outside 97 Things; see CONTENT-LICENSE.md.

FAQ

How does 97 compare to popular plugins like superpowers or BMAD?

They sit at different layers, so you can run them side by side:

Layer	Project	What it changes
Methodology	BMAD-METHOD	Which role the agent plays and which phase of the SDLC it's in (PM, Architect, Dev, SM…)
Process	superpowers	How the agent works — when to plan, how to debug, when work is verified
Craft	97	What makes the code good once the agent is writing — naming, API shape, error handling, testing, security

Take writing a test:

• BMAD picks who on the agent team writes it (the Dev persona).
• superpowers/test-driven-development decides whether a test gets written.
• 97/testing-discipline decides what makes that test any good.

97's bootstrap is explicit about the superpowers boundary: process skills fire first. superpowers/verification-before-completion asks did it work; 97/pre-commit-self-review asks is it well-considered.

Credits

• 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts — O'Reilly, ed. Kevlin Henney (book, CC-BY-3.0 source mirror)
• Birat Rai's 97-day Medium walkthrough of every essay (used as a reading aid)
• superpowers by Jesse Vincent for the multi-harness distribution pattern

Licensing

• Plugin code: MIT — see LICENSE.
• Skill content: original commentary on principles drawn from the source authors named above, with per-principle attribution. Unofficial work, not affiliated with O'Reilly, Kevlin Henney, or any contributor. See CONTENT-LICENSE.md for the full policy and takedown commitment.

Development

We use just as the local task runner. Run just with no args to list recipes:

just            # list available recipes
just check      # everything CI runs: lint + format-check + smoke
just lint       # structural lint of skills/
just format     # prettier --write on JS/JSON/YAML

CI uses npm test directly (which is the same as just check), so contributors who prefer npm don't need to install just:

npm test          # same as `just check`
npm run lint      # same as `just lint`
npm run smoke     # same as `just test`

One devDependency: prettier. Zero runtime deps.

For the full contributor guide — repo layout, changelog discipline, release process, CI/CD, and the multi-harness adapter pattern — see CONTRIBUTE.md. For agent-specific conventions, see AGENTS.md.