domain-modeling

A glossary-building guide for agreeing on the meaning of important terms in a software project.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps create and maintain a terminology-only glossary at the project’s specifications folder when product or architecture work introduces unclear concepts.
Why use it?
It prevents different people or coding agents from using several names for the same idea or one name for different ideas.

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/etr/groundwork/domain-modeling
Any agent
npx skills add etr/groundwork --skill domain-modeling
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/etr/groundwork

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 32 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,095 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 $0.00032 $0.01095
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00548
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00219
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00110

Measured 2d ago against content hash 045da7f32a37, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

domain-modeling 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/domain-modeling/SKILL.md · 69 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 69 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Domain Modeling

Overview

A project's agents are verbose and misaligned when they lack a shared language: the same concept gets three names, one name covers three concepts, and every prompt re-explains what a term means. A tight glossary fixes this — it collapses ambiguity and tokens at once.

Core principle: the glossary is terminology only. One authoritative definition per term, and nothing else. It is never a spec, never an architecture doc, never a scratchpad. The moment an entry carries implementation detail or a design decision, it stops being a glossary and starts rotting.

The glossary lives at {{specs_dir}}/glossary.md.

When to Use

  • Defining a product or feature and a term keeps getting used loosely or two ways ([[design-product]], [[understanding-feature-requests]])
  • Architecture work surfaces concepts the team has no agreed name for ([[design-architecture]])
  • You catch yourself re-explaining the same concept across prompts or docs

Lazy Creation

{{specs_dir}}/glossary.md does not exist until the first term resolves. Do not scaffold an empty file or a placeholder. An empty glossary is sediment; create the file when you have a real first entry, not before.

Process

Capture terms inline, as they crystallize during design and requirements work — never in a batch at the end. Batching loses the context that made the term precise.

  1. Capture on crystallization. A concept earns an entry the moment it has a stable, agreed meaning. Write it immediately, in the format below. Do not wait for a "glossary pass."
  2. Challenge vague or conflicting language on the spot. When usage drifts, name it: "Your glossary defines X as A, but you're using it as B — which is it?" Resolve to one definition; update the entry or the usage, never both meanings.
  3. Stress-test relationships with concrete edge cases. Walk a real scenario at the boundary — empty, zero, expired, two-at-once — and check the definition and its links still hold. If the scenario breaks the entry, the term was underspecified; tighten it.
  4. Cross-check terms against the code. Surface contradictions where the code's structures and names disagree with the agreed term. A glossary that contradicts the codebase is worse than none — reconcile the name, the definition, or the code.

Read the full file on GitHub · 69 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 · 69 lines · 32 tokens per session scan A 045da7f32a37

Subscribe to this mod's changes

domain-modeling is a skill published in the GitHub repository etr/groundwork (42 stars, last pushed 21d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 32 tokens to every session and 1,095 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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