documentation-and-adrs

documentation-and-adrs is a skill for Claude Code from addyosmani/agent-skills. It costs 58 tokens per session (2,154 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A practice for recording important technical decisions and the reasons behind them. An architecture decision record, or ADR, is a short document that captures the choice, its context, trade-offs, and alternatives.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for major design choices, data models, authentication, public API changes, framework or dependency choices, and user-facing changes that need context.
Why use it?
It preserves knowledge that code alone does not show. Future developers and coding agents can understand why the system works a certain way instead of reopening the same decisions.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md.

Part of the agent-skills plugin — 25 skills, 10 commands, 4 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it for major design choices, data models, authentication, public API changes, framework or dependency choices, and user-facing changes that need context.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/documentation-and-adrs
About the project

addyosmani/agent-skills is a collection of reusable workflows, quality checks, commands, and other instructions that guide AI coding agents through software development. It is for developers who want agents to follow consistent engineering practices, and the catalogue entries are its packaged skills, commands, agents, plugins, instructions, and hooks.

addyosmani/agent-skills · 93,568 stars · on GitHub · skills.addy.ie

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.

Any agent
npx skills add addyosmani/agent-skills --skill documentation-and-adrs
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/addyosmani/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install agent-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 25 skills, 10 commands, 4 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 documentation-and-adrs

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/documentation-and-adrs/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/documentation-and-adrs)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/documentation-and-adrs"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/documentation-and-adrs/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 documentation-and-adrs

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/documentation-and-adrs"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/documentation-and-adrs.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 58 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,154 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. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 4 Apr 2026
  • Snyk pass 31 Jul 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00058 $0.02154
Opus 5 $0.00029 $0.01077
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00431
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00215

Measured 3d ago against content hash 87ae44a0c7bb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

documentation-and-adrs 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 3d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/documentation-and-adrs/SKILL.md · 289 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 289 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Documentation and ADRs

Overview

Document decisions, not just code. The most valuable documentation captures the why — the context, constraints, and trade-offs that led to a decision. Code shows what was built; documentation explains why it was built this way and what alternatives were considered. This context is essential for future humans and agents working in the codebase.

When to Use

  • Making a significant architectural decision
  • Choosing between competing approaches
  • Adding or changing a public API
  • Shipping a feature that changes user-facing behavior
  • Onboarding new team members (or agents) to the project
  • When you find yourself explaining the same thing repeatedly

When NOT to use: Don't document obvious code. Don't add comments that restate what the code already says. Don't write docs for throwaway prototypes.

Architecture Decision Records (ADRs)

ADRs capture the reasoning behind significant technical decisions. They're the highest-value documentation you can write.

When to Write an ADR

  • Choosing a framework, library, or major dependency
  • Designing a data model or database schema
  • Selecting an authentication strategy
  • Deciding on an API architecture (REST vs. GraphQL vs. tRPC)
  • Choosing between build tools, hosting platforms, or infrastructure
  • Any decision that would be expensive to reverse

Match the existing convention first

Before creating an ADR, inspect the available repository context for an established convention — existing ADRs, project instructions, and ADR-related configuration or tooling (e.g. an .adr-dir file). An established convention overrides the defaults below. Match:

  • Location and format — e.g. docs/adr/*.md, Documentation/Decisions/*.rst, a MADR layout, or an adr-tools setup. Match the existing directory, file extension, and markup (Markdown vs reStructuredText).
  • Numbering and naming — continue the existing sequence and filename pattern (ADR-004-Title.rst, 0004-title.md, …); don't restart at 001 or introduce a second scheme.
  • Section headings — reuse the project's heading set rather than imposing this template's.

Read the full file on GitHub · 289 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. 3d ago Changed · +15 tokens per session 87ae44a0c7bb
  2. 13d ago First seen · 289 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A b867bb80fb68

Subscribe to this mod's changes

documentation-and-adrs is a skill published in the GitHub repository addyosmani/agent-skills (93,568 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 58 tokens to every session and 2,154 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.

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