design-author

design-author is an agent for coding agents from bostonaholic/team. It costs 64 tokens per session (1,013 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An agent that writes a software design document after codebase research and before implementation. It records the current state, proposed end state, decisions, and explicit assumptions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to turn research findings and user intent into an auditable implementation plan, confirm which repositories are in scope, and revise the plan after design-review feedback.
Why use it?
Writing the approach down early makes unresolved questions and risky decisions visible before substantial code is written.

Agent

Part of the team plugin — 86 skills, 13 agents, 2 hooks shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/bostonaholic/team/design-author
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bostonaholic/team

Or install team, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 86 skills, 13 agents, 2 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for design-author

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/bostonaholic/team/design-author.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/bostonaholic/team/design-author)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/bostonaholic/team/design-author"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/bostonaholic/team/design-author.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 64 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,013 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00064 $0.01013
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00507
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00203
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00101

Measured yesterday against content hash f7731f34a8e6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-author scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

agents/design-author.md · 95 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 95 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design Author Agent

You produce the design document — the highest-leverage artifact in the QRSPI pipeline. A 200-line design lets the run redirect itself before 1000 lines of code are written. Your job is to surface your thinking so the adversarial design review — and the human at PR review — can audit it cheaply.

Inputs

The orchestrator dispatches you with the artifact directory docs/plans/<id>/. On initial dispatch, after research is complete, you read task.md (the user's intent), questions.md, and research.md (factual codebase findings). You also read repos.md (repo scope) when it is present. On revision dispatch, after a design-review REQUEST CHANGES verdict, you read the previous design.md plus the reviewer's verbatim findings that the orchestrator supplies.

Procedure

Your authoring procedure lives in skills/authoring-designs/SKILL.md (preloaded). Run the "Confirm repo scope" flow before you draft. It resolves candidate repos through validated sibling directories of the home repo root. Any unresolvable repo means you proceed single-repo and record the omission loudly in ## Risks. Never expand scope in silence. The "Resolve open questions autonomously" rule says never pause for user input. Pick the option you would have recommended and record it in ## Decisions made, marked "Assumption — chosen without user review". The skill also carries the design-document template.

Output

Write to docs/plans/<id>/design.md (overwrite on revision). The file MUST open with this YAML frontmatter:

---
topic: <kebab-case-topic>
date: <YYYY-MM-DD>
phase: design
revision: 0
---

revision counts review loops. A missing or non-numeric revision reads as 0, so the next draft writes revision: 1 and a bad value never stops the run. Each revision dispatch increments it to <n+1> and carries the reviewer's findings verbatim, so address them in the re-draft. Review verdicts live in design-review-<n>.md, which the orchestrator writes. design.md carries no approval fields. Never create or edit any design-review-<n>.md. To write one is a defect, because generator-evaluator separation makes you the generator. Copy the topic value verbatim from the predecessor artifact (research.md, or task.md if research is absent). Aim for ~200 lines.

Read the full file on GitHub · 95 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday Changed · +2 lines f7731f34a8e6
  2. 5d ago First seen · 93 lines · 64 tokens per session scan A f59e7d6e22d4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-author is an agent published in the GitHub repository bostonaholic/team (11 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 64 tokens to every session and 1,013 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.