api-and-interface-design

api-and-interface-design is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from 233i/agent-skills. It costs 54 tokens per session (2,584 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

Guidance for designing stable interfaces between software components, including REST APIs, GraphQL schemas, modules, and UI component properties. An API is the agreed way that one piece of software communicates with another.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when creating or changing API endpoints, module boundaries, component properties, database schemas that affect an API, or other public interfaces.
Why use it?
It helps prevent interface changes from unexpectedly breaking users or other parts of the system. It also explains how to define the contract before writing the implementation.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the agent-skills plugin — 20 skills, 7 commands, 3 agents, 1 hook 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 skills/233i/agent-skills/api-and-interface-design
Any agent
npx skills add 233i/agent-skills --skill api-and-interface-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/233i/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install agent-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 20 skills, 7 commands, 3 agents, 1 hook.

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 api-and-interface-design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/233i/agent-skills/api-and-interface-design.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/233i/agent-skills/api-and-interface-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/233i/agent-skills/api-and-interface-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/233i/agent-skills/api-and-interface-design.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 54 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,584 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 $0.00054 $0.02584
Opus 5 $0.00027 $0.01292
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00517
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00258

Measured 5d ago against content hash cd1b5cf3fb24, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

api-and-interface-design 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 5d ago.

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.

skills/api-and-interface-design/SKILL.md · 295 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 295 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

API 与接口设计

概览

设计稳定、文档完备且不容易被误用的接口。好的接口会让正确用法变得容易,让错误用法变得困难。这适用于 REST API、GraphQL schema、模块边界、组件 props,以及任何一段代码与另一段代码对话的表面。

何时使用

  • 设计新的 API endpoint
  • 定义模块边界或团队之间的契约
  • 设计组件 prop 接口
  • 制定会影响 API 形状的数据库 schema
  • 修改现有公开接口

核心原则

海勒姆定律(Hyrum's Law)

With a sufficient number of users of an API, all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody, regardless of what you promise in the contract.

这句话的意思是:只要用户足够多,系统里每一个可观察行为,哪怕是没写进文档的怪癖、错误文案、时序和顺序,都会被某些人依赖上。一旦有人依赖,它就变成了事实契约。因此:

  • 暴露什么必须是有意识的。 每一个可观察行为都可能成为长期承诺
  • 不要泄露实现细节。 用户能观察到,就会依赖它
  • 在设计时就考虑弃用。 如何安全移除已被依赖的东西,见 deprecation-and-migration
  • 测试不够。 即使有完美的契约测试,Hyrum's Law 仍意味着“看似安全”的改动也可能打断真实用户

单版本原则(One-Version Rule)

尽量避免让消费者在同一个依赖或 API 的多个版本之间做选择。不同消费者依赖不同版本时,会形成经典的菱形依赖问题。设计时要尽量假设“同一时间只存在一个版本”,优先扩展而不是分叉。

1. 先定义契约

先定义接口,再实现它。契约本身就是 spec,实现应该跟着契约走。

// Define the contract first
interface TaskAPI {
  // Creates a task and returns the created task with server-generated fields
  createTask(input: CreateTaskInput): Promise<Task>;

  // Returns paginated tasks matching filters
  listTasks(params: ListTasksParams): Promise<PaginatedResult<Task>>;

  // Returns a single task or throws NotFoundError
  getTask(id: string): Promise<Task>;

  // Partial update — only provided fields change
  updateTask(id: string, input: UpdateTaskInput): Promise<Task>;

  // Idempotent delete — succeeds even if already deleted
  deleteTask(id: string): Promise<void>;
}

2. 错误语义保持一致

选一种错误策略,然后在所有地方都坚持使用:

// REST: HTTP status codes + structured error body
// Every error response follows the same shape
interface APIError {
  error: {
    code: string;        // Machine-readable: "VALIDATION_ERROR"
    message: string;     // Human-readable: "Email is required"
    details?: unknown;   // Additional context when helpful
  };
}

// Status code mapping
// 400 → Client sent invalid data
// 401 → Not authenticated
// 403 → Authenticated but not authorized
// 404 → Resource not found
// 409 → Conflict (duplicate, version mismatch)
// 422 → Validation failed (semantically invalid)
// 500 → Server error (never expose internal details)

Read the full file on GitHub · 295 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. 5d ago First seen · 295 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A cd1b5cf3fb24

Subscribe to this mod's changes

api-and-interface-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository 233i/agent-skills (6 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 2,584 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 2026-08-31.

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