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.