design-the-mva

design-the-mva is a skill for Claude Code from impactbrussels/AINativeOS. It costs 154 tokens per session (1,289 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A method for defining a Minimum Viable Agent—the smallest agent that proves one important work loop instead of bundling many features.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to choose a frequent, rule-based, low-risk task and scope the first agent around testing that task.
Why use it?
It helps teams avoid building a feature pile before learning whether a person will trust a machine with the central task.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the ai-native-os plugin — 25 skills, 6 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to choose a frequent, rule-based, low-risk task and scope the first agent around testing that task.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/impactbrussels/ainativeos/design-the-mva
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 impactbrussels/AINativeOS --skill design-the-mva
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/impactbrussels/AINativeOS

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ai-native-os, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 25 skills, 6 agents.

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 design-the-mva

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/impactbrussels/ainativeos/design-the-mva/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/impactbrussels/ainativeos/design-the-mva)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/impactbrussels/ainativeos/design-the-mva"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/impactbrussels/ainativeos/design-the-mva/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 design-the-mva

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/impactbrussels/ainativeos/design-the-mva"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/impactbrussels/ainativeos/design-the-mva.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 154 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,289 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 $0.00154 $0.01289
Opus 5 $0.00077 $0.00645
Sonnet 5 $0.00031 $0.00258
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00129

Measured 9d ago against content hash a837ec0ffe58, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-the-mva 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 9d 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/design-the-mva/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.

Design the MVA

The cheapest thing in your company is now a feature. You describe one in a sentence and it works by lunch, which is exactly the trap dressed as a gift. So founders pile up panels and integrations and call it a product, while the one question that decides whether the company lives goes untested: will a real person let a machine own the job the whole thing depends on. Ship the smallest agent that proves that loop, not the feature pile that flatters you.

The method

Full method, the Goldilocks scoring filters, a worked MVA scope, anti-patterns, and a copyable template: references/mva-method.md.

Step 1 - Find the Goldilocks task

Pick one task that is high-volume, guideline-based, and low-risk, all three at once. High-volume, so the loop runs often enough to save real time and throw off real signal. Guideline-based, so there is a knowable right answer a human can check at a glance. Low-risk, so a wrong answer is an annoyance and not a harm. Your highest-value task is usually your highest-risk one. Write that on the roadmap for later. Earn trust on the boring task next to it first.

Step 2 - Define the Minimum Viable Agent

The Minimum Viable Agent is the smallest agent that proves the intelligence loop closes: task in, agent acts, outcome out, human accepts or corrects, the system records the choice. The deliverable is not a screen. It is a working loop around one task, and it can be thin on the surface: a text box, an email reply, a row someone approves. The intelligence is the product.

Step 3 - Name the one high-risk hypothesis it tests

State the trust bet so it can come back no: users in role R, facing task T, will accept the agent's output without redoing it at least M percent of the time. One hypothesis, not a multi-feature dashboard. If a proposed build does not map to a bet that can fail, it is scope creep, however reasonable it sounds.

Step 4 - Add the self-healing fallback

Decide in one bounded sentence what the agent does when it is unsure or the model fails: retry a set number of times, switch to a backup, then drop to a fixed non-AI path and escalate to a named human. A pilot user who hits a dead end twice goes back to doing it by hand. You lose them on reliability, not capability.

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. 9d ago First seen · 69 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A a837ec0ffe58

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-the-mva is a skill published in the GitHub repository impactbrussels/AINativeOS (1 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 154 tokens to every session and 1,289 once invoked, about $0.0008 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.