decompose-work

decompose-work is a skill for Codex from ashermahonin/agentic-skills. It costs 77 tokens per session (419 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning skill that turns approved product requirements and architecture into smaller work items. It maps dependencies, ownership, validation steps, merge order, and tasks that can safely happen in parallel.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to split a large implementation into epics, user stories, and concrete tasks before assigning work to coding agents.
Why use it?
It removes uncertainty about what needs to be built first, who owns each part, and where separate coding efforts might conflict.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: agents/openai.yaml present.

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/ashermahonin/agentic-skills/decompose-work
Any agent
npx skills add ashermahonin/agentic-skills --skill decompose-work
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ashermahonin/agentic-skills

Made for: Codex.

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 decompose-work

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ashermahonin/agentic-skills/decompose-work.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ashermahonin/agentic-skills/decompose-work)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ashermahonin/agentic-skills/decompose-work"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ashermahonin/agentic-skills/decompose-work.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 77 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 419 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 5.1 $0.00077 $0.00419
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00210
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00084
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00042

Measured 6d ago against content hash 6b65bd1d969e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

decompose-work 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 6d 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.

agentic/skills/decompose-work/SKILL.md · 55 lines

What it actually says

Decompose Work

Purpose

Make implementation boring in the best way. Convert a big plan into small, owned, sequenced tasks that can run without stepping on each other.

Inputs

  • Confirm requirements and architecture are approved enough to decompose.
  • List deliverables and affected modules.
  • Identify dependencies, shared files, contracts, and migration order.
  • Decide which tasks can run in parallel and which must stay serial.

Decision process

  1. Create epics for coherent slices of value or infrastructure.
  2. Break epics into stories and tasks with clear done criteria.
  3. Assign each task a write scope, interfaces touched, validation command, and expected docs update.
  4. Build the dependency graph and critical path.
  5. Define parallel lanes only when file ownership and contracts are disjoint.
  6. Write merge order, conflict policy, and fallback if a lane blocks.

Decision boundaries

  • Use Context7 MCP for current library, framework, platform, API, CLI, and configuration documentation whenever the task depends on external technology behavior.

Decision record

  • Epics
  • Stories
  • Tasks
  • Dependency graph
  • Parallelization plan
  • Agent role matrix

Ready when

  • A task without validation is not ready.
  • A parallel task without ownership boundaries is not parallel-ready.
  • Do not split work by agent count; split by coherent boundaries.
  • Keep merge order visible.

Handoff

Hand off each implementation task with scope, files, contracts, validation, docs, dependencies, and merge order.

References

  • references/parallelization-policy.md: Use this before running multiple agents or parallel implementation lanes.
Files

What ships with it

2 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. 6d ago First seen · 55 lines · 77 tokens per session scan A 6b65bd1d969e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

decompose-work is a skill published in the GitHub repository ashermahonin/agentic-skills (10 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 77 tokens to every session and 419 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 2026-08-31.

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