extracting-acceptance-criteria

extracting-acceptance-criteria is a skill for Claude Code from Acendas/shipyard. It costs 16 tokens per session (2,522 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for turning a feature description into small, observable requirements called acceptance criteria. Each criterion states one result that a builder can implement and a reviewer can check.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when discussing, specifying, planning, or reporting a feature, including turning a bug report into a requirement that the bug must not return.
Why use it?
Feature descriptions often combine several requirements in one paragraph, making gaps easy to miss. Splitting them up gives testing and review a clear checklist.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the shipyard plugin — 32 skills, 7 agents, 4 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it when discussing, specifying, planning, or reporting a feature, including turning a bug report into a requirement that the bug must not return.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add Acendas/shipyard
Claude Code
/plugin install shipyard

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install shipyard, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 32 skills, 7 agents, 4 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 extracting-acceptance-criteria

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/acendas/shipyard/extracting-acceptance-criteria/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/acendas/shipyard/extracting-acceptance-criteria)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/acendas/shipyard/extracting-acceptance-criteria"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/acendas/shipyard/extracting-acceptance-criteria/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for extracting-acceptance-criteria

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/acendas/shipyard/extracting-acceptance-criteria"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/acendas/shipyard/extracting-acceptance-criteria.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 16 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,522 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00016 $0.02522
Opus 5 $0.00008 $0.01261
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00504
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00252

Measured 10d ago against content hash 8adf82022736, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

extracting-acceptance-criteria 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 10d 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.

plugins/shipyard/skills/extracting-acceptance-criteria/SKILL.md · 174 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 174 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Extracting Acceptance Criteria

A feature description is usually a paragraph: "users should be able to create accounts with email + password, get a verification email, and log in once verified." That description has three or four implicit acceptance criteria woven together. This skill pulls them out into a list a builder can implement against and a reviewer can check.

The output is the input to authoring-acceptance-probe (which probes each AC) and dispatching-spec-review (which verifies each AC was met).

When to Invoke

Caller Trigger
/ship-discuss Right after the user's feature pitch crystallizes — convert prose into ACs before edge-case discovery
/ship-spec When auditing or rewriting a feature spec; pull ACs out of buried prose
/ship-sprint When breaking a feature into tasks, each task gets a slice of the feature's ACs
/ship-bug Convert a bug report into a regression AC ("the system shall not ")

If the spec already has a clean numbered AC list with one observable per item, don't invoke this skill — there's nothing to extract. Read and follow discovering-edge-cases instead to find missing ACs.

Inputs

  • feature_text — the prose description, user request, or existing spec section.
  • parent_context — optional pointer to the parent feature/epic for inheritance (a sub-feature inherits the parent's domain ACs unless overridden).
  • domain_hints["payments", "auth", "external-api", ...], used to pre-load domain-specific AC patterns (idempotency, audit, etc.).

What an Acceptance Criterion Is

An AC is a single, observable, testable statement about what the system does (or doesn't do) under specific conditions. The shape:

Given <context>, when <action>, then <observable outcome>.

Literal Given/When/Then phrasing is optional. The shape enforces three properties: a starting condition, a triggering action, and an observable outcome that a probe can check.

Examples (good):

Read the full file on GitHub · 174 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. 10d ago First seen · 174 lines · 16 tokens per session scan A 8adf82022736

Subscribe to this mod's changes

extracting-acceptance-criteria is a skill published in the GitHub repository Acendas/shipyard (2 stars, last pushed 28d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 16 tokens to every session and 2,522 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.