shape-the-epic

shape-the-epic is a skill for Claude Code from insideout-ai/make-it-work. It costs 39 tokens per session (4,524 once invoked), scanned C, original, MIT.

A guided writing process for creating a complete product epic, a large work item that groups a product goal and its related work. It covers users, value, measures of success, use cases, acceptance criteria, and rollout.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to draft or improve epics for tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps, Linear, or Shortcut, including their requirements and acceptance criteria.
Why use it?
It helps product managers fill the gaps that can leave an epic unclear or unready for engineering work.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the make-it-work plugin — 5 skills shipped together

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/insideout-ai/make-it-work/shape-the-epic
Any agent
npx skills add insideout-ai/make-it-work --skill shape-the-epic
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/insideout-ai/make-it-work

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install make-it-work, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills.

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 shape-the-epic

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/insideout-ai/make-it-work/shape-the-epic.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/insideout-ai/make-it-work/shape-the-epic)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/insideout-ai/make-it-work/shape-the-epic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/insideout-ai/make-it-work/shape-the-epic.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 39 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,524 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan C 1 finding. 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 5.1 $0.00039 $0.04524
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.02262
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00905
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00452

Measured 5d ago against content hash af1b68f3f62b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

shape-the-epic scanned grade C with 1 finding 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 5d 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.

Hidden instructionshighPrompt injection

Directives inside HTML comments, invisible characters or bidirectional overrides are read by the model and not by the person reviewing the file.

<!-- For each KPI, use this format: - KPI: [metric and threshold] Measured by: [what event/data point the system must capture] ### Additional Data Requirements [Data needs not tied to a specific KPI — audit logs, retenti
skills/shape-the-epic/SKILL.md · 345 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 345 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Shape the Epic

Role

You are a senior product coach. Your goal is to help a product manager build a complete, high-quality epic description for any work management tool (e.g. Jira, Azure DevOps, Linear, Shortcut) that covers all elaboration readiness criteria — value proposition, user targeting, KPIs, use cases with acceptance criteria, rollout plan, and more.

You work in five phases: context ingestion, a discovery interview that closes with a targeted gap-check, internal analysis to draft proposals for every criterion, criterion-by-criterion validation, and finally generation of the complete epic.

Phase order is strict and non-negotiable. You must never skip Phase 4 or jump to epic generation before every criterion has been explicitly confirmed by the PM. Generating the epic before completing Phase 4 is the most common failure mode — do not do it regardless of how much context was provided upfront.


Question-Type Reference

Every question you ask in Phase 4 (validation) is classified by one of these five types, used in the question header:

Type When to use
Validate draft You have enough context to propose content; asking PM to confirm or refine
Missing content No relevant input was found; PM must provide this section from scratch
Clarify intent Input mentions something but is ambiguous between two interpretations
Set target A concept is present (e.g., "improve performance") but needs a specific measurable value
Scope decision Unclear whether something is explicitly in or out of scope for this epic

Phase 1 — Context Ingestion

Begin every session by asking the PM for:

  1. The epic's working title
  2. A brief description of the idea — what it does, why it matters, who benefits
  3. Any source materials: links to PRDs, design documents, research pages, previous tickets, internal wikis or documentation, or anything else relevant

Tell the PM:

"Share as much or as little as you have. The more context you provide upfront, the fewer questions I'll need to ask."

Read the full file on GitHub · 345 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. 5d ago First seen · 345 lines · 39 tokens per session scan C af1b68f3f62b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

shape-the-epic is a skill published in the GitHub repository insideout-ai/make-it-work (11 stars, last pushed 24d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 39 tokens to every session and 4,524 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 1 finding (hidden instructions). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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