agent-design

agent-design is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from freezingfunky/ashwin-skills. It costs 94 tokens per session (1,964 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

Instructions for designing an AI agent around one clear outcome and four parts: task, context, memory, and evaluation. An agent is a software system that performs a defined job using AI.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for planning, building, reviewing, or debugging agents and deciding when one broad job should become several separate agents.
Why use it?
It helps expose unclear goals and missing information before implementation, making it easier to tell whether the agent worked.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code.

Good fit It is for planning, building, reviewing, or debugging agents and deciding when one broad job should become several separate agents.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/freezingfunky/ashwin-skills/agent-design
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 freezingfunky/ashwin-skills --skill agent-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/freezingfunky/ashwin-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 agent-design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/freezingfunky/ashwin-skills/agent-design.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/freezingfunky/ashwin-skills/agent-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/freezingfunky/ashwin-skills/agent-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/freezingfunky/ashwin-skills/agent-design.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 94 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,964 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 $0.00094 $0.01964
Opus 5 $0.00047 $0.00982
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00393
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00196

Measured 8d ago against content hash 45a9e82be40e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

agent-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 8d 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/agent-design/SKILL.md · 175 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 175 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Agent design — decision map, then four pillars

Most "I'm not good at building agents" is really "I build them by feel and can't predict whether the next one will be good." The fix is to name the method.

A working agent is four things, and a weak agent is usually missing one:

Task · Context · Memory · Eval.

But first: one agent = one outcome. If you can name two outcomes that succeed or fail independently, you have two agents — each gets its own design pass.

0. Decision map — singular outcome or split

Do this before filling the pillars. Completion criterion: either (a) one singular DONE/FAILED pair locked, or (b) an explicit split list, this session designs one, and parked agents are either fan-out-spawned after confirm or left for later re-entry.

Steps

  1. Draft the singular outcome in one sentence (what "this agent worked" means).
  2. List aspects that feel like separate focuses (intake, summarize, notify, …).
  3. Smell test each aspect: same DONE/FAILED as the draft outcome?
    • Same → keep inside this agent.
    • Independent success/fail → split into a separate agent name + its DONE.
  4. Emit one of:
    • One agent — proceed to pillars below for that outcome.
    • Multiple agents — print the full split table (name · DONE · FAILED). Pick one to design in this session (recommend the dependency-root). Park the rest. Then run §0b Fan-out before or while continuing pillars for the in-session agent.
  5. Fog vs size:
    • One outcome, still foggy (open decisions) → stay in the decision map; resolve open questions one at a time until the outcome is sharp.
    • One outcome, too big for one run → still one agent design; use handoff/memory across runs — do not invent a second agent unless the outcome splits.

0b. Fan-out (parked agents → parallel sessions)

Never spawn without an explicit user confirm. Silent fan-out is a failure mode.

After the split list is on screen, ask once:

Read the full file on GitHub · 175 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. 8d ago First seen · 175 lines · 94 tokens per session scan A 45a9e82be40e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

agent-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository freezingfunky/ashwin-skills (2 stars, last pushed 21d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 94 tokens to every session and 1,964 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.