design

A design workflow for planning nontrivial code changes with precise interfaces, file locations, trade-offs, and verification steps.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps specify contracts, exact files and function signatures, architecture choices, alternatives, and tests or type checks for each unit of work.
Why use it?
It reduces ambiguity when a change affects how parts of a codebase communicate or when several designs could work.

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/douglance/sdlc-plugin/design
Any agent
npx skills add douglance/sdlc-plugin --skill design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/douglance/sdlc-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 26 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 552 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 $0.00026 $0.00552
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.00276
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00110
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00055

Measured 2d ago against content hash 974dae450a4e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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.

.agents/skills/design/SKILL.md · 46 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 46 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Use lifecycle-documentation only when the result needs a durable artifact or handoff.

Make the work precise. Design the interfaces and contracts, name the exact files and signatures, and define the architecture and its trade-offs. Specify how each unit of work will be verified.

Favor stable interfaces and the simplest design that meets the requirements. Don't over-build — every element of the design must trace to a requirement.

Ground every claim about the current architecture in exact path:line evidence and identify the closest existing implementation as prior art for each substantial boundary. When the design mainly preserves accumulated exceptions, run find-simplifying-insight and require a falsification test before replacing the current model.

What a design contains

  • Interfaces and contracts — the boundaries between parts and what crosses them.
  • Exact files and signatures — name them; leave no ambiguity for whoever builds.
  • Trade-offs — the alternatives you considered and why you chose this one.
  • Verification — a test or typecheck command for each unit of work.

Principles

Design for high cohesion (each module does one thing) and low coupling (modules depend on each other's interfaces, never their internals). Apply information hiding — put each likely-to-change decision behind an interface — so change stays local. Stable interfaces over clever internals; the simplest design that satisfies the requirements wins.

Architectural design

For system-wide structure — not just one module — make the architecture explicit:

  • Stakeholders & concerns — who the design must satisfy (users, operators, security) and what each needs.
  • Views — describe the system from the angles that matter: logical (modules and responsibilities), runtime (processes and data flow), deployment (where it runs). A diagram or a few lines each.
  • Architecturally-significant decisions — the choices hard to reverse or that drive a quality attribute (performance, security, scalability). Record each as an ADR (see documentation-and-adrs).
  • Tradeoff analysis — for each significant decision, list the options and score them against the quality attributes that matter, then pick with rationale rather than by default.

Read the full file on GitHub · 46 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. 2d ago First seen · 46 lines · 26 tokens per session scan A 974dae450a4e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design is a skill published in the GitHub repository douglance/sdlc-plugin (4 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 26 tokens to every session and 552 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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