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.
npx agentmods add skills/helderberto/agent-skills/codebase-designnpx skills add helderberto/agent-skills --skill codebase-designgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/helderberto/agent-skillsWhat 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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00057 | $0.01259 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00028 | $0.00629 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00011 | $0.00252 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00006 | $0.00126 |
Grade A, and why
codebase-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.
This is a copy
84% identical to codebase-design — 37 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 108 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Codebase Design
Design deep modules: a lot of behaviour behind a small interface, placed at a clean seam, testable through that interface. Use this language and these principles wherever code is being designed or restructured. The aim is leverage for callers, locality for maintainers, and testability for everyone.
Glossary
Use these terms exactly — don't substitute "component," "service," "API," or "boundary." Consistent language is the whole point.
Module — anything with an interface and an implementation. Deliberately scale-agnostic: a function, class, package, or tier-spanning slice. Avoid: unit, component, service.
Interface — everything a caller must know to use the module correctly: the type signature, but also invariants, ordering constraints, error modes, required configuration, and performance characteristics. Avoid: API, signature (too narrow — they refer only to the type-level surface).
Implementation — what's inside a module, its body of code. Distinct from Adapter: a thing can be a small adapter with a large implementation (a Postgres repo) or a large adapter with a small implementation (an in-memory fake). Reach for "adapter" when the seam is the topic; "implementation" otherwise.
Depth — leverage at the interface: the amount of behaviour a caller (or test) can exercise per unit of interface they have to learn. A module is deep when a large amount of behaviour sits behind a small interface, shallow when the interface is nearly as complex as the implementation.
Seam (Michael Feathers) — a place where you can alter behaviour without editing in that place; the location at which a module's interface lives. Where to put the seam is its own design decision, distinct from what goes behind it. Avoid: boundary (overloaded with DDD's bounded context).
Adapter — a concrete thing that satisfies an interface at a seam. Describes role (what slot it fills), not substance (what's inside).
Leverage — what callers get from depth: more capability per unit of interface they learn. One implementation pays back across N call sites and M tests.
What ships with it
2 files 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.
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.
- 2d ago First seen · 108 lines · 57 tokens per session scan A 30cedde769b1
codebase-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository helderberto/agent-skills (13 stars, last pushed 11d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 57 tokens to every session and 1,259 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 84% identical to codebase-design, differing in 37 lines, and is treated as a copy.
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