Benjamin Plus Skill Review: The Measured Token-Efficiency Skill for Coding Agents
The Benjamin Plus skill is a ~745-token ruleset that JetBrains publishes under MIT to cut coding-agent cost by changing how an agent looks things up and waits. On 80 paired SkillsBench tasks it measured −17.9% median cost (p=0.005) with no detectable quality loss — but only when injected into the prompt, not installed as a discoverable skill. What Is the benjamin-plus Skill, and What Does It Refuse to Be? Benjamin-Plus is a five-rule instruction payload for coding agents, published by JetBrains on 2026-08-17 and licensed MIT. It changes how your agent performs lookups and waits; it never changes what the agent builds. The repository states the thesis in one sentence: “An agent pays twice for every clumsy lookup: once for the step itself, and again every time the growing conversation gets re-read.” ...