design-smell-review

design-smell-review is a skill for Claude Code from charlieviettq/awesome-agent-skill. It costs 51 tokens per session (446 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structural review for finding design problems in software modules and interfaces, such as mixed responsibilities, tight coupling, unclear boundaries, and unnecessary complexity.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for reviewing module structure, dependencies, public interfaces, testability, and the smallest useful improvement to the design.
Why use it?
It helps identify changes that make code harder to maintain before a large refactor or when a system feels difficult to modify.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: built for gstack.

Good fit It is for reviewing module structure, dependencies, public interfaces, testability, and the smallest useful improvement to the design.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/charlieviettq/awesome-agent-skill/design-smell-review
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 charlieviettq/awesome-agent-skill --skill design-smell-review
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/charlieviettq/awesome-agent-skill

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 design-smell-review

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/charlieviettq/awesome-agent-skill/design-smell-review/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/charlieviettq/awesome-agent-skill/design-smell-review)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/charlieviettq/awesome-agent-skill/design-smell-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/charlieviettq/awesome-agent-skill/design-smell-review/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 design-smell-review

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/charlieviettq/awesome-agent-skill/design-smell-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/charlieviettq/awesome-agent-skill/design-smell-review.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 51 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 446 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.
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 $0.00051 $0.00446
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00223
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00089
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00045

Measured 9d ago against content hash 99c6ced52908, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-smell-review 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 9d 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.

.claude/skills/design-smell-review/SKILL.md · 58 lines

What it actually says

Design smell review

Scope

Review structure and boundaries, not line-by-line style. Pair with PR diff review for changes; use this for module-level health.

Smell checklist

Smell Signal Direction
God module Many unrelated responsibilities Split by domain
Shotgun surgery One change touches many files Consolidate logic
Feature envy Module A mostly uses B's data Move behavior
Leaky abstraction Impl details escape API Narrow public surface
Config soup Magic strings everywhere Named constants / schema
Boolean flags if is_x branches everywhere Polymorphism or strategy

Workflow

  1. Map entry points and dependencies (imports, public API).
  2. List responsibilities per module; flag >1 unrelated core job.
  3. Check testability — can core logic run without I/O?
  4. Propose smallest structural improvement (not full rewrite).
  5. Record decision in ADR if trade-off is significant.

Output format

## Summary
[1-2 sentences]

## Smells (priority order)
1. [Smell] — evidence — suggested fix (effort: S/M/L)

## Recommended next step
[One concrete change to try first]

Simplification (Chesterton's Fence)

Before deleting or collapsing code, ask why it exists:

  • Comment, test, or git history explaining constraint?
  • If unknown, prefer small experiment or question over bulk delete.
  • Remove duplication only when behavior is proven identical.
  • "Fewer lines" is not success if edge cases or observability regress.

Boundaries

  • Do not block small fixes on perfect architecture.
  • Prefer incremental extraction over big-bang rewrites.
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. 9d ago First seen · 58 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A 99c6ced52908

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-smell-review is a skill published in the GitHub repository charlieviettq/awesome-agent-skill (25 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 51 tokens to every session and 446 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 2026-09-03.

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