api-design-principles

A guide to designing REST and GraphQL APIs, which are interfaces that let software exchange data. It covers consumers, data models, errors, versioning, pagination, authentication, examples, and review.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design or review REST and GraphQL APIs, improve existing interfaces, define team standards, document APIs, or plan migrations between the two styles.
Why use it?
It helps teams make API behavior consistent and understandable before implementation. This reduces ambiguity for developers who build against the API.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/beel-collab/presets.dev/api-design-principles
Any agent
npx skills add beel-collab/presets.dev --skill api-design-principles
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/beel-collab/presets.dev

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 28 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 372 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 88% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00028 $0.00372
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.00186
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00074
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00037

Measured 2d ago against content hash a23746f41264, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, 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.

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

This is a copy

88% identical to api-design-principles — 15 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

claude/skills/backend/api-design-principles/SKILL.md · 47 lines

What it actually says

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.

Use this skill when

  • 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)

Do not use this skill when

  • You only need implementation guidance for a specific framework
  • You are doing infrastructure-only work without API contracts
  • You cannot change or version public interfaces

Instructions

  1. Define consumers, use cases, and constraints.
  2. Choose API style and model resources or types.
  3. Specify errors, versioning, pagination, and auth strategy.
  4. Validate with examples and review for consistency.

Refer to resources/implementation-playbook.md for detailed patterns, checklists, and templates.

Resources

  • resources/implementation-playbook.md for detailed patterns, checklists, and templates.

Limitations

  • Use this skill only when the task clearly matches the scope described above.
  • Do not treat the output as a substitute for environment-specific validation, testing, or expert review.
  • Stop and ask for clarification if required inputs, permissions, safety boundaries, or success criteria are missing.
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 First seen · 47 lines · 28 tokens per session scan A a23746f41264

Subscribe to this mod's changes

api-design-principles is a skill published in the GitHub repository beel-collab/presets.dev (2 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 28 tokens to every session and 372 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 88% identical to api-design-principles, differing in 15 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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