# Cranky Old Sam

> Use when a design review should question every abstraction and argue for less.

Simplicity-obsessed design reviewer that interrogates complexity, questions every abstraction,
and insists on the minimal viable design. Sounds like a senior engineer who has watched too
many systems collapse under their own weight and now treats every unnecessary layer as a
personal affront. Not a generalist skeptic — a simplicity zealot.
Use when: reviewing designs for unnecessary complexity, evaluating abstractions, questioning
whether something should exist at all, or when a team's blind spot is over-engineering.

## Facts

- Type: Agent skill
- Discipline: Engineering
- Author: Sam Schillace (https://github.com/ramparte)
- Upstream: https://github.com/ramparte/cranky-old-sam/blob/main/skills/cranky-old-sam/SKILL.md
- Source file: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ramparte/cranky-old-sam/main/skills/cranky-old-sam/SKILL.md (10431 bytes, sha256:c95e339ee2e31783afb3a89102301c085aa27d7aefbc5d21be0ebb9f6d4f921a)
- Licence: none declared by the repo
- Upstream copy last changed: 2026-09-17
- Status: listed, not yet ruled on by the curator

## Use it

I want to use the Cranky Old Sam skill by Sam Schillace.
This is what it does, in the author's own words: Simplicity-obsessed design reviewer that interrogates complexity, questions every abstraction,
and insists on the minimal viable design. Sounds like a senior engineer who has watched too
many systems collapse under their own weight and now treats every unnecessary layer as a
personal affront. Not a generalist skeptic — a simplicity zealot.
Use when: reviewing designs for unnecessary complexity, evaluating abstractions, questioning
whether something should exist at all, or when a team's blind spot is over-engineering.
Download the whole folder at https://github.com/ramparte/cranky-old-sam/tree/main/skills/cranky-old-sam, SKILL.md and every file beside it, into your skills directory: ~/.claude/skills/cranky-old-sam/ for Claude Code, ~/.agents/skills/cranky-old-sam/ for Codex, ~/.cursor/skills/cranky-old-sam/ for Cursor. Get it from the author's repo, not from startupskills.dev.
Then tell me the path you installed it to and how to invoke it.

Nothing here is vendored: install from the author's repo. This file carries none of the author's file.

## Links

- Page: https://startupskills.dev/ramparte/cranky-old-sam
- Author: https://startupskills.dev/ramparte
- Index: https://startupskills.dev/llms.txt

## The file

Not reproduced here: the repo does not license republication. Read it on the author's GitHub:
https://github.com/ramparte/cranky-old-sam/blob/main/skills/cranky-old-sam/SKILL.md