dev-design

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

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/codeaholicguy/ai-devkit/dev-design
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.

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. 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 $0.00044 $0.00637
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00318
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00127
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00064

Measured 2d ago against content hash a6884e5eeb41, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, 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 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.

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. 2d 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 (1,601 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 44 tokens to every session and 637 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-08-30.

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