dev-design

dev-design is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from codeaholicguy/ai-devkit. It costs 44 tokens per session (637 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

Guidance for reviewing a feature’s design against its requirements before changing documentation or code. It covers architecture, scope, validation, rollout, trade-offs, and unresolved decisions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for architecture reviews, design documents, feature planning, or the third design phase of a development lifecycle. It helps decide what is included, how it will work, and how it will be validated.
Why use it?
It helps expose missing decisions or contradictions early, when they are cheaper to resolve. It also requires the design to be checked against the project’s documented requirements.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: shipped in a Claude Code plugin, but also agents/openai.yaml present.

Part of the ai-devkit plugin — 29 skills, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it for architecture reviews, design documents, feature planning, or the third design phase of a development lifecycle. It helps decide what is included, how it will work, and how it will be validated.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/codeaholicguy/ai-devkit/dev-design
About the project

AI DevKit is a local-first control layer that gives multiple AI coding agents shared configuration, a terminal dashboard, cross-agent messaging, local memory retrieval, and reusable engineering workflows. It is for developers and teams supervising agents such as Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Pi, Cursor, Copilot, or Devin. The catalogue entries are composable skills and plugin components used within that agent-management system.

codeaholicguy/ai-devkit · 1,647 stars · on GitHub · ai-devkit.com

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 codeaholicguy/ai-devkit --skill dev-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/codeaholicguy/ai-devkit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install ai-devkit, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 29 skills, 1 hook.

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 dev-design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/codeaholicguy/ai-devkit/dev-design/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/codeaholicguy/ai-devkit/dev-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/codeaholicguy/ai-devkit/dev-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/codeaholicguy/ai-devkit/dev-design/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 dev-design

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/codeaholicguy/ai-devkit/dev-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/codeaholicguy/ai-devkit/dev-design.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 44 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 637 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: 3 findings, up to medium

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 →

  • medium MCP Rug Pull · line 12
    npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.
    Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
  • medium MCP Rug Pull · line 13
    npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.
    Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
  • medium MCP Rug Pull · line 25
    npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.
    Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
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 $0.00044 $0.00637
Opus 5.5 $0.00018 $0.00255
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00009 $0.00127
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00064

Measured 1mo ago against content hash a6884e5eeb41, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

dev-design 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 1mo 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/dev-design/SKILL.md · 40 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 40 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Dev Design

Run the design review phase for configured AI docs features. Before changing docs or code, propose the concrete plan for this phase and wait for user approval unless the user already approved the exact phase plan.

Phase Contract

  1. Run npx ai-devkit@latest lint before phase work.
  2. If working on a named feature, run npx ai-devkit@latest lint --feature <name>.
  3. Read existing requirements and design docs before changes.
  4. Ask until every material architecture, scope, validation, rollout, contradiction, trade-off, or open question is answered, explicitly deferred, or accepted as a named assumption.
  5. Ask one decision at a time, with why it matters, 2-3 viable options when useful, and a recommended answer.
  6. Do not approve or transition past design while material open questions remain.
  7. Use mermaid diagrams for architecture visuals where a diagram clarifies the design.
  8. If parent dev-lifecycle established usable task tracing, emit design phase, progress, blocker/open-question, and next-step events per task.

Review Design

Use for Phase 3.

  1. Run npx ai-devkit@latest lint --feature <name> and review the design doc path it validates. If manual path resolution is unavoidable, first resolve .ai-devkit.json paths.docs, falling back to docs/ai.
  2. Search memory for relevant architecture patterns or past decisions.
  3. Cross-check against the latest matching requirements doc. Verify every goal, user story, and constraint has corresponding design coverage. Flag uncovered requirements.
  4. Review completeness: architecture, components, technology choices, data models, API contracts, design trade-offs, and non-functional requirements.
  5. Check usage-first design: APIs, CLI flows, UI flows, and docs should optimize for their caller/user, not implementation convenience.
  6. Screen design red flags: shallow modules, pass-through layers, temporal decomposition, leaked transport/storage/framework types, scattered validation, synchronized flags, and repeated conditionals where a domain model would fit.
  7. Resolve every gap, misalignment, open question, hidden assumption, or unresolved trade-off between requirements and design.
  8. Brainstorm alternatives for key architecture decisions and trade-offs before accepting the first approach.
  9. Prefer subtract-before-add sequencing: delete obsolete paths, consolidate redundant concepts, and narrow scope before adding new structure.
  10. Update the design doc with clarified decisions and chosen options.
  11. Store reusable architecture decisions in memory.
  12. If task tracing is available, record design coverage progress, next step, or blockers per task.
  13. Summarize requirements coverage, completeness assessment, updates made, and remaining gaps.

Read the full file on GitHub · 40 lines

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. 1mo ago First seen · 40 lines · 44 tokens per session scan A a6884e5eeb41

Subscribe to this mod's changes

dev-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository codeaholicguy/ai-devkit (1,647 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 44 tokens to every session and 637 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.