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ken
Make your AI agent think first and rewrite over patch
Ken Thompson wrote Unix in three weeks by thinking first, stealing proven ideas, building bottom-up, and rewriting anything that fought back. ken puts that discipline inside your AI agent: think first, reuse over invent, brute force until measured, rewrite over a fourth patch. It ships as a plugin for Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot, Gemini CLI, Codex and any AGENTS.md agent and it’s benchmarked on behavior, not lines of code. Every rule traces back to Thompson’s own words.
Hey Product Hunt 👋
I built ken because AI agents tend to patch the same broken function a fourth time instead of rewriting it, reinvent helpers that already exist, and pull in dependencies nobody vouched for.
ken encodes Ken Thompson's build discipline as a rule the agent follows on every task: think first, steal proven ideas over inventing, build bottom-up, brute force until measurement proves it wrong, and rewrite a thrice-patched unit instead of patching it again.
The part I'm proudest of: it's measured on behavior, not lines of code. In one benchmark round, ken rewrote 6 of 6 planted-rot functions; without it, 0 of 6 same model, same tickets. All the runs, wins and misses included, are in the repo.
It works with Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, Copilot, Gemini CLI, Codex, and any AGENTS.md-reading agent. MIT licensed.
Would love your feedback especially where the discipline should bend.
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About ken on Product Hunt
“Make your AI agent think first and rewrite over patch”
ken was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 3 upvotes and 1 comments, placing #108 on the daily leaderboard. Ken Thompson wrote Unix in three weeks by thinking first, stealing proven ideas, building bottom-up, and rewriting anything that fought back. ken puts that discipline inside your AI agent: think first, reuse over invent, brute force until measured, rewrite over a fourth patch. It ships as a plugin for Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot, Gemini CLI, Codex and any AGENTS.md agent and it’s benchmarked on behavior, not lines of code. Every rule traces back to Thompson’s own words.
ken was featured in Open Source (68.8k followers), Developer Tools (518.9k followers), Artificial Intelligence (477.9k followers) and GitHub (41.4k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 245.3k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted ken?
ken was hunted by Raj Nandan Sharma. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Raj Nandan Sharma