Individual skill

factor-of-safety

Use this skill whenever the design will encounter conditions that can't be fully predicted at design time — load spikes, edge-case content, real-world variability, hardware variation, third-party flakiness, or any "what if" scenario. Trigger when scoping performance budgets, designing for content extremes, picking infrastructure capacity, designing error-handling, or planning for the long tail of users with unusual setups. Factor of Safety is one of the foundational principles in 'Universal Principles of Design' (Lidwell, Holden, Butler 2003) — also called "factor of ignorance" because the size of the safety factor is proportional to how much you *don't* know.

plugins/process-and-robustness-principles/skills/factor-of-safety/SKILL.md

Source commit 09b9858fc983fe917b7fedae67a9625d9e6655a6

What was checked

Matches the observed repository HEAD

Yes

Scanner rules are current

Yes

Repository scan complete

No

Skill scan complete

Yes

Observed behavior

Instructions only

Last checked

Nov 6, 2026

These are observations at the recorded commit, not a guarantee of safety. Review the source before running it.

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