plan-then-build

plan-then-build is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from buildmoonshot/skillpacks. It costs 71 tokens per session (364 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning step for coding work that makes the agent outline its approach before changing code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before a feature, bug fix, or change spanning several lines or files. It helps identify touched files, choices, and the main risk.
Why use it?
It catches wrong assumptions early, before they become costly implementation work.

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/buildmoonshot/skillpacks/plan-then-build
Any agent
npx skills add buildmoonshot/skillpacks --skill plan-then-build
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/buildmoonshot/skillpacks

Made for: Claude Code, 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 plan-then-build

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/buildmoonshot/skillpacks/plan-then-build.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/buildmoonshot/skillpacks/plan-then-build)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/buildmoonshot/skillpacks/plan-then-build"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/buildmoonshot/skillpacks/plan-then-build.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 71 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 364 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 $0.00071 $0.00364
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00182
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00073
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00036

Measured 4d ago against content hash b2c9c75f68ae, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

plan-then-build 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 4d 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.

skills/engineering/beginner/plan-then-build/SKILL.md · 27 lines

What it actually says

Plan, Then Build

For any task bigger than a trivial one-liner, outline the approach before writing code.

What to do

  1. State the plan first — a short numbered list of the steps you'll take and the files you'll touch. Keep it to a few lines; this is a sketch, not a document.

  2. Surface assumptions and choices. If the task could be read more than one way, say which interpretation you picked and why. If there's a meaningfully simpler approach, mention it.

  3. Name the risk. Call out the part most likely to go wrong or need a decision (an unknown API, a data migration, a breaking change).

  4. Then build. For a clear, low-risk task, present the plan and proceed in the same turn. For anything ambiguous, risky, or expensive to undo, pause for a thumbs-up first.

Keep it proportional

The plan should be much shorter than the code it precedes. A one-file bug fix gets one or two lines of plan. A multi-file feature gets a short list. Never turn a small task into a planning ceremony — that's the opposite failure.

Why this matters

A wrong assumption caught at the plan stage costs one sentence to fix. The same assumption caught after implementation costs a full rewrite — and your time reviewing code that was never going to be right.

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 4d ago First seen · 27 lines · 71 tokens per session scan A b2c9c75f68ae

Subscribe to this mod's changes

plan-then-build is a skill published in the GitHub repository buildmoonshot/skillpacks (2 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 71 tokens to every session and 364 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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