technical-blueprint

A guide for writing a Technical Design Document (TDD), also called a Software Design Document (SDD), which explains how a specific feature or component should be built.

In plain words
What is it for?
Describing requirements, data models, API contracts, alternatives, security risks, tests, and rollback steps for a planned change.
Why use it?
It helps uncover design gaps before implementation and gives engineers a shared build plan.

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/fattain-naime/engineering-docs/technical-blueprint
Any agent
npx skills add fattain-naime/engineering-docs --skill technical-blueprint
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fattain-naime/engineering-docs

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 77 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,177 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 $0.00077 $0.03177
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.01588
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00635
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00318

Measured 2d ago against content hash 2be6ec6bbb3d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

technical-blueprint 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/technical-blueprint/SKILL.md · 247 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 247 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Purpose

Produce a Technical Design Document (TDD) that captures the engineering design of a specific feature or component with enough detail that any qualified engineer on the team can implement it correctly. This document is a thinking tool first, an artifact second - the process of writing it surfaces gaps before they become production bugs.

Unlike an architecture document (what the system is), a blueprint specifies how a specific piece will be built.

Input

Works best with: The name of the feature, component, or change to be designed. Also valuable: The technical specification or requirements document, existing codebase context, known constraints (performance targets, security requirements, API contracts that must be maintained).

Example invocation: Write a technical design document for adding TOTP-based two-factor authentication to the admin login flow. We use PHP 8.3, PDO/MySQL, and Twig templates. The TOTP secret must be stored encrypted. Recovery codes must be supported.

Key Concepts

Design Doc Philosophy (Google/Stripe Standard)

A design doc is:

  • Short as possible, long as necessary. If it takes more than 45 minutes to read, it is too long.
  • Trade-off focused. The Alternatives Considered section is mandatory. It proves you evaluated options.
  • A conversation starter. Share early and revise often. A design doc is not a contract.
  • Living. Update it as the implementation evolves. Stale design docs are worse than no design docs.

The Mandatory Sections

These three sections separate a senior engineer's design doc from a junior one:

  1. Alternatives Considered - What else was evaluated and why it was rejected
  2. Security Considerations / Threat Model - What can be attacked or abused
  3. Rollback Plan - What happens if this change needs to be reverted

Observability

Every new feature must be observable in production. Document in the blueprint:

  • Logging: What structured log events does this feature emit? Include correlation IDs, operation type, duration, and outcome. Define log levels (ERROR for failures, WARN for degraded state, INFO for business events).
  • Metrics: What metrics does this feature expose? (e.g., request count, error rate, latency histogram, queue depth, custom business metrics like "payments_processed_total").
  • Tracing: How does this feature participate in distributed tracing? What spans are created? What context is propagated?
  • Alerting: What conditions should trigger alerts? Define thresholds, severity levels (P1-P4), and escalation paths.

Read the full file on GitHub · 247 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 · 247 lines · 77 tokens per session scan A 2be6ec6bbb3d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

technical-blueprint is a skill published in the GitHub repository fattain-naime/engineering-docs (4 stars, last pushed 18d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 77 tokens to every session and 3,177 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 2026-08-31.

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