YOINK

YOINK (You Only Implement Native Knowledge) is an AI agent that removes complex dependencies by reimplementing only what you need.

YOINK is currently built as a Claude Code plugin that decomposes third-party dependencies into internal replacements. Instead of importing a 50k-line SDK for three function calls, point yoink at the package, describe what you need, and it reimplements only the functionality you actually use, verified against the expectations of the original library's tests.

They say "don't reinvent the wheel" but what if you could?

Why now?

AI agents are getting good enough to own code end-to-end, and with supply chain attacks accelerating, fewer dependencies means less attack surface.

Classical software engineering would have you believe that dependencies are good (we're building pyramids from bricks), but imo this has to be re-evaluated, and it's why I've been so growingly averse to them, preferring to use LLMs to "yoink" functionality when it's simple enough and possible. - Andrej Karpathy

OpenAI's harness engineering article echoed this: agents reason better from reimplemented functionality they have full visibility into, over opaque third-party libraries.

In some cases, it was cheaper to have the agent reimplement subsets of functionality than to work around opaque upstream behavior from public libraries. For example, rather than pulling in a generic p-limit-style package, we implemented our own map-with-concurrency helper: it’s tightly integrated with our OpenTelemetry instrumentation, has 100% test coverage, and behaves exactly the way our runtime expects. - Ryan Lopopolo (OpenAI)

We are making this capability accessible to anyone.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• uv — used for Python dependency management and script execution

Install

Add the yoink marketplace and install the plugin from within Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add theogbrand/yoink
/plugin install yoink@yoink-marketplace
/reload-plugins

Usage

Navigate to any project and run /yoink:yoink:

/yoink:yoink "Replace usage of litellm with my own implementation" --url "https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm"

Skills

yoink runs three skills sequentially:

1. /yoink:setup clones the target repo and scaffolds a local replacement package.
2. /yoink:curate-tests studies the reference implementation and generates new tests, verified against the expectations of the original test suite.
3. /yoink:decompose determines dependencies to keep or decompose, based on a set of principles we defined, such as "keeping foundational primitives regardless of how narrow they are used".

The /yoink:yoink command runs all three in sequence.

/yoink:yoink

Curate tests from a target package, then decompose its dependencies into a local, dependency-free replacement. Runs in three phases: setup (Phase 1), test curation (Phase 2), and dependency decomposition (Phase 3).

Usage:

/yoink:yoink "" --url "<github_url>" [--package ""] [--skip-test-discoverer]