actual-mcp-server: Skill for Claude Code

.claude/skills/api-design-principles/SKILL.md

api-design-principles is a skill for Claude Code from agigante80/actual-mcp-server. It costs 75 tokens per session (5,222 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of rules for designing consistent APIs, including the MCP tools exposed by this project. An API is the defined way that software exposes actions and data to other software.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when adding or revising MCP tools, reviewing their schemas, or setting standards for REST, GraphQL, or other software interfaces.
Why use it?
It prevents tool names, inputs, outputs, and resource concepts from becoming inconsistent as the API grows.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md.

This is agigante80/actual-mcp-server's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on actual-mcp-server itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything actual-mcp-server configures →

Needs its repository: it reads a path above its own folder, which exists only inside the repository. The line is import { isPreflightRefusal } from '../lib/errors.js';.

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to agigante80/actual-mcp-server. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/agigante80/actual-mcp-server/main/.claude/skills/api-design-principles/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/agigante80/actual-mcp-server

Made for: Claude Code.

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-design-principles

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/agigante80/actual-mcp-server/api-design-principles/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/agigante80/actual-mcp-server/api-design-principles)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/agigante80/actual-mcp-server/api-design-principles"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/agigante80/actual-mcp-server/api-design-principles/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 api-design-principles

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/agigante80/actual-mcp-server/api-design-principles"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/agigante80/actual-mcp-server/api-design-principles.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 75 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,222 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
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Tool Misuse · line 201
    Tool parameters are crafted to achieve unintended or unsafe behavior. Parameter abuse can bypass intended safety checks (e.g. shell=True, --force, dangerous glob patterns).
    Fix: Validate all tool parameters against an allowlist. Reject dangerous parameter values (shell=True, --force, -rf /) and use safe defaults.
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 $0.00075 $0.05222
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.02611
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.01044
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00522

Measured 2d ago against content hash 35838af8ce6f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

api-design-principles 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 2d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (assets/rest-api-template.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

.claude/skills/api-design-principles/SKILL.md · 633 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 633 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

API Design Principles

Master REST and GraphQL API design principles to build intuitive, scalable, and maintainable APIs that delight developers and stand the test of time.

When to Use This Skill

  • Designing new REST or GraphQL APIs
  • Refactoring existing APIs for better usability
  • Establishing API design standards for your team
  • Reviewing API specifications before implementation
  • Migrating between API paradigms (REST to GraphQL, etc.)
  • Creating developer-friendly API documentation
  • Optimizing APIs for specific use cases (mobile, third-party integrations)

Applying this to actual-mcp-server (the project API is MCP tools)

This project exposes no REST or GraphQL surface: its "API" is the set of 71 MCP tools advertised over the HTTP and stdio transports. Read the generic REST/GraphQL sections below as the underlying principles, and apply them through these project rules (from CLAUDE.md):

  • Resource-oriented naming maps to actual_{domain}_{action}. The domain is the noun (accounts, transactions, budgets, payees, rules, schedules), the action is the verb (create, update, delete, list, get, search). Keep a new tool consistent with the existing names in src/actualToolsManager.ts (IMPLEMENTED_TOOLS); a lone inconsistent verb is the tell that the design drifted.
  • The schema IS the contract. Every tool's input is a Zod object (prefer createTool() from src/lib/toolFactory.ts; reuse fields from CommonSchemas in src/lib/schemas/common.ts). The published JSON Schema is what clients (and models) consume, so it must be self-describing and strict-client-safe: keep it ECMA-262/OpenAI-compatible (no \p{...}/\u{...} patterns, guarded by tests/unit/schema_json_openai_compat.test.js), and give every field a .describe().
  • Types are fixed by convention, not per-tool invention. Amounts are always integer cents (5000 = $50.00, never decimal dollars). Dates are YYYY-MM-DD strings, never Date.now(). IDs use CommonSchemas.<entity>Id, and tests/unit/tool_id_schema_drift.test.js fails the build if an id-shaped field does not (#380). Note this line USED to be aspirational: when the guard was written, 33 of 41 id fields were on one of three looser forms (a bare z.string(), a .min(1).max(64) bound, or an inline UUID_PATTERN meaning the identical thing), so accounts_update.id was published as a UUID while categories_update.id was published as any string. A convention four fifths of the surface ignores is not a convention, which is why it is now enforced rather than stated.

Read the full file on GitHub · 633 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 2d ago Changed 35838af8ce6f
  2. 5d ago Changed 6a504720b8e8
  3. 9d ago First seen · 633 lines · 75 tokens per session scan A 92339db78753

Subscribe to this mod's changes

api-design-principles is a skill published in the GitHub repository agigante80/actual-mcp-server (51 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 75 tokens to every session and 5,222 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.