status-colors-and-errors

status-colors-and-errors is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from dembrandt/dembrandt-skills. It costs 73 tokens per session (1,558 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to using a small, consistent set of colours for statuses and errors in user interfaces. It explains how each colour should carry one clear meaning and how error messages should help users recover.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing success, warning, information, and failure indicators, as well as form errors and other recovery paths.
Why use it?
Too many or inconsistent colours make it harder to understand what is happening, especially when something goes wrong. Clear error states also prevent users from getting stuck or making larger mistakes.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

not rated 54repo +2 2d ago A scan Socket: passSnyk: passSkillSpector: warn 73 tokens original MIT

Good fit Use it when designing success, warning, information, and failure indicators, as well as form errors and other recovery paths.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/dembrandt/dembrandt-skills/status-colors-and-errors
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 dembrandt/dembrandt-skills --skill status-colors-and-errors
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dembrandt/dembrandt-skills

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 status-colors-and-errors

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dembrandt/dembrandt-skills/status-colors-and-errors/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/dembrandt/dembrandt-skills/status-colors-and-errors)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/dembrandt/dembrandt-skills/status-colors-and-errors"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dembrandt/dembrandt-skills/status-colors-and-errors/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 status-colors-and-errors

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/dembrandt/dembrandt-skills/status-colors-and-errors"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dembrandt/dembrandt-skills/status-colors-and-errors.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 73 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,558 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
  • Socket pass 19 Apr 2026
  • Snyk pass 19 Apr 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, 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 Excessive Agency · line 147
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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 $0.00073 $0.01558
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00779
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00312
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00156

Measured 12d ago against content hash 9f9aad86733c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

status-colors-and-errors 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 12d 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/status-colors-and-errors/SKILL.md · 148 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 148 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Status Colours and Error Design

Keep the Colour Set Small

Every status colour added to a system is a cognitive burden on the user. They must learn what each colour means, remember it, and interpret it correctly under stress — which is exactly when errors occur.

The minimal set that covers almost everything:

Colour Semantic meaning Always means
Red Error / failure / destructive Something went wrong, or this action cannot be undone
Orange / Amber Warning Something needs attention before proceeding
Green Success / positive Action completed, state is healthy
Blue Info / neutral status Informational, no action required

Rule: each colour maps to exactly one meaning across the entire product. If orange means "warning" in one component and "pending" in another, the system breaks down.

When in doubt, cut the colour — neutral grey communicates status without semantic weight, and neutral is better than a misused semantic colour.

Orange Is Always a Warning

Orange (amber) carries a specific signal: pay attention, something may go wrong. Do not use it for:

  • Neutral states (use grey)
  • Progress or pending (use blue or a spinner)
  • Informational content (use blue)
  • Branding or decorative purposes inside status indicators

If orange appears in the UI, the user should immediately know it requires their attention.

Errors Should Be Recoverable

The worst error is one the user cannot recover from. Design every error state with a path forward.

Error message anatomy

Every error should answer three questions:

  1. What went wrong? — plain language, no error codes
  2. Why did it happen? — if useful and known
  3. What should the user do next? — specific, actionable
❌ "Error 500"
❌ "Something went wrong"
✓  "We couldn't save your changes. Check your connection and try again."
✓  "This email is already in use. Sign in instead, or use a different email."

Recovery actions

  • Always provide a retry button for transient failures (network errors, timeouts)
  • For validation errors, point directly to the problematic field
  • For destructive actions that failed, reassure the user nothing was lost
  • For session expiry, redirect to login and return the user to where they were

Read the full file on GitHub · 148 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. 12d ago First seen · 148 lines · 73 tokens per session scan A 9f9aad86733c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

status-colors-and-errors is a skill published in the GitHub repository dembrandt/dembrandt-skills (54 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 73 tokens to every session and 1,558 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 2026-08-30.

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