breaking-down-design-docs

breaking-down-design-docs is a skill for Claude Code from d-mariano/spicyclaude. It costs 157 tokens per session (4,686 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for turning a technical design document, such as an RFC, PRD, or implementation proposal, into epics and actionable user stories.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to identify clarifying questions, propose an epic and story split, and then expand confirmed stories with acceptance criteria and explicit out-of-scope items.
Why use it?
It prevents polished-looking tickets from hiding unanswered questions, missing dependencies, or an unclear solution.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; names the AskUserQuestion tool; mentions Claude Code.

Good fit Use it to identify clarifying questions, propose an epic and story split, and then expand confirmed stories with acceptance criteria and explicit out-of-scope items.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/d-mariano/spicyclaude/design-breakdown
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 d-mariano/spicyclaude --skill design-breakdown
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/d-mariano/spicyclaude

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 breaking-down-design-docs

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/d-mariano/spicyclaude/design-breakdown/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/d-mariano/spicyclaude/design-breakdown)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/d-mariano/spicyclaude/design-breakdown"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/d-mariano/spicyclaude/design-breakdown/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 breaking-down-design-docs

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/d-mariano/spicyclaude/design-breakdown"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/d-mariano/spicyclaude/design-breakdown.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 157 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,686 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 $0.00157 $0.04686
Opus 5 $0.00078 $0.02343
Sonnet 5 $0.00031 $0.00937
Haiku 4.5 $0.00016 $0.00469

Measured 11d ago against content hash f31e8aa1854f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

breaking-down-design-docs 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 11d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (references/publish-breakdown-acli.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/design-breakdown/SKILL.md · 301 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 301 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Breaking down design docs

The default failure mode of this task is producing a tidy-looking list of tickets that hides ambiguity. Resist that. It is better to surface three real questions than to invent answers and ship a clean-looking breakdown built on guesses.

Early exit: if the doc is a problem statement without a proposed solution, don't fake a breakdown. Say so and offer to break the discovery work down into spikes instead.

The workflow has a hard gate

Three phases. Do not skip from Phase 2 to Phase 3 without explicit user confirmation. That gate is the whole point of this skill — it gives the user a chance to redirect the breakdown before you've spent effort expanding stories that will be thrown away.

Copy this checklist into your response and check items off as you go:

Breakdown progress:
- [ ] Phase 1: Read doc, ground in repo context, surface clarifying questions
- [ ] Phase 1 GATE: User has answered the must-answer questions (or said "skip, your call")
- [ ] Phase 2: Propose epic structure + story titles (one line each) + pushback
- [ ] Phase 2 GATE: User has confirmed or revised the split
- [ ] Phase 3: Expand each confirmed story to full markdown
- [ ] Phase 3: (Optional) Push to Jira if `acli` is available and user opted in

Phase 1: Read and ground

If the user has only mentioned a design doc without sharing it, ask for the path, URL, or pasted content before proceeding. Otherwise, read the doc carefully. Then, before drafting anything:

Ground the breakdown in repo reality (Claude Code only). A breakdown disconnected from the codebase is fiction. Spend a few tool calls doing things like:

  • Look at the repo's top-level structure and README.md to understand what's already there.
  • Search for any module, service, or file the design names. If the design says "extend the BillingService", confirm BillingService actually exists and skim it.
  • Check existing tests near the touched code — they reveal real contracts and edge cases the doc may omit.
  • If the design references an external API or library, check whether it's already a dependency.

Read the full file on GitHub · 301 lines

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. 11d ago First seen · 301 lines · 157 tokens per session scan A f31e8aa1854f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

breaking-down-design-docs is a skill published in the GitHub repository d-mariano/spicyclaude (5 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 157 tokens to every session and 4,686 once invoked, about $0.0008 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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