s4h-design-constraints

s4h-design-constraints is a skill for Claude Code from human-avatar/skills-for-humanity. It costs 76 tokens per session (1,547 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A design-thinking guide that routes a problem to the right kind of design work, such as understanding user needs, mapping limits, testing ideas, or simplifying a result.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when deciding whether to research user needs, identify design constraints, create and test iterations, or remove unnecessary parts.
Why use it?
It helps clarify what design question is actually being solved before choosing an approach.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the skills-for-humanity plugin — 197 skills, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it when deciding whether to research user needs, identify design constraints, create and test iterations, or remove unnecessary parts.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-constraints
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 human-avatar/skills-for-humanity --skill s4h-design-constraints
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install skills-for-humanity, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 197 skills, 1 hook.

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 s4h-design-constraints

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-constraints/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-constraints)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-constraints"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-constraints/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for s4h-design-constraints

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-constraints"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-design-constraints.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 76 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,547 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00076 $0.01547
Opus 5 $0.00038 $0.00773
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00309
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00155

Measured 12d ago against content hash cbd6c7e7bc48, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

s4h-design-constraints 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 12d 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/s4h-design-constraints/SKILL.md · 120 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 120 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design: Design Constraints

Every design problem has a solution space — the set of forms that could satisfy the need. Constraints are not what prevent good design; they are what define the problem precisely enough to be solved. A problem with no constraints has no solution because it has no shape. The designer's task is to understand the constraint set completely: which limits are genuinely fixed, which are preferences that could move, and what territory they collectively leave open.

Christopher Alexander's work on pattern languages makes this explicit: every good design form is a response to a specific set of forces in tension. Understanding those forces — what they require, where they conflict, where they align — is how a designer finds the form that resolves them. Jony Ive's approach at Apple was similar: start with the hardest constraints (manufacturing tolerances, material properties, thermal dissipation) and let design decisions cascade from there. The hardest constraint is often the most generative.

This skill maps the full constraint set, classifies each constraint by hardness, surfaces the interactions between them, and identifies where the productive design space lies within the boundaries they collectively draw.


Your Process

Step 1: Elicit the Full Constraint Set List every known constraint. Do not classify or judge yet — just enumerate. Include:

  • Technical constraints (what the medium or material allows)
  • Physical constraints (size, weight, space, material properties)
  • Economic constraints (cost, time, resources)
  • Regulatory or legal constraints (requirements that must be met)
  • Organisational constraints (what the team, system, or process can support)
  • User constraints (what users can understand, do, or accept)
  • Aesthetic or brand constraints (what must be consistent with existing forms)

Framing check: Confirm the design context and the constraint domain before continuing. State what you've identified — the thing being designed and the primary constraint types in play — in one sentence, then use AskUserQuestion:

  • Question: "I'm reading this as: [your one-sentence framing of the design context and constraints]. Is that right?"
  • Header: "Framing"
  • Options:
    • Yes — proceed — framing is correct
    • Adjust — one element is off; user will correct it before you continue
    • Reframe — different situation than read; incorporate the correction before proceeding

Read the full file on GitHub · 120 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. 12d ago First seen · 120 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A cbd6c7e7bc48

Subscribe to this mod's changes

s4h-design-constraints is a skill published in the GitHub repository human-avatar/skills-for-humanity (223 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 1,547 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 2026-08-30.

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