deconstruct

deconstruct is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from jamesgray-ai/handsonai-plugins. It costs 171 tokens per session (11,662 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow requirements guide for describing what a business process must do, including its rules and edge cases. It is the second step in a broader process for designing AI workflows.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to break down a business workflow, capture requirements for an AI system, and define what counts as completion. It supports processes with known steps as well as systems driven mainly by a goal.
Why use it?
It keeps requirements separate from implementation details, so the document explains the desired behavior rather than prematurely choosing AI components. The result can be understood by someone who was not part of the original discussion.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the handsonai plugin — 13 skills, 1 agent 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/jamesgray-ai/handsonai-plugins/deconstruct
Any agent
npx skills add jamesgray-ai/handsonai-plugins --skill deconstruct
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jamesgray-ai/handsonai-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install handsonai, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 skills, 1 agent.

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 deconstruct

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jamesgray-ai/handsonai-plugins/deconstruct.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jamesgray-ai/handsonai-plugins/deconstruct)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jamesgray-ai/handsonai-plugins/deconstruct"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jamesgray-ai/handsonai-plugins/deconstruct.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 171 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 11,662 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. 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 $0.00171 $0.11662
Opus 5 $0.00086 $0.05831
Sonnet 5 $0.00034 $0.02332
Haiku 4.5 $0.00017 $0.01166

Measured 3d ago against content hash 3bcf1ea10c59, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

deconstruct 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 3d 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.

plugins/handsonai/skills/deconstruct/SKILL.md · 497 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 497 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Workflow Deconstruction

Step 2 is the PRD for the workflow. It captures what the workflow must do and the rules it must follow — not how AI building blocks will deliver it (that's Step 3, Design).

The output is a Workflow Requirements document written in clear, concise requirements language. It must be self-contained enough that a reader who never saw this conversation — including the Design skill or any agent model — can act on it without re-interviewing the user.

The Two Paths

Step 2 has two paths, mapped directly to the two ways students think about a workflow:

Path When to use Mental model
Step-driven (a known-steps workflow) The work runs the same way each run — you can describe how it gets done, even if the steps aren't mapped yet. Design will classify it as a deterministic or guided workflow — both run on steps you own. "I know how the work gets done"
Goal-driven (an agent system) You know what "done" looks like, but the work takes different steps depending on what comes in — so you give an agent system a goal and let it figure out the steps at runtime. Design classifies these as autonomous. "I know the goal"

Both paths produce a Workflow Requirements document with the same shared shell — only the middle "what does the workflow do" block differs.

What "goal" means here. An agent goal is a deliverable with a completion state — something you can look at after a single run and verify is done. It is not a business objective or an impact metric: "higher revenue" is a business objective (record it in Value & Measurement → Business Objective); "a ranked list of 20 qualified prospects matching our ICP, with contact info" is an agent goal. The goal bundles the deliverable plus the rules and acceptance criteria for it — what major agent frameworks call the expected output and success criteria. (If you know the product-management "outcomes over outputs" framing: the agent's goal is closer to an output — the business outcome belongs in Business Objective.) The defining trait of this path is who owns the control flow: the agent decides the path to the goal at runtime, while you own the definition of done. Note the inverse doesn't hold — a step-driven workflow can still use an agent for an individual step; what makes a workflow goal-driven is that the agent decides the overall sequence, not merely that agents are involved.

Read the full file on GitHub · 497 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. 3d ago First seen · 497 lines · 171 tokens per session scan A 3bcf1ea10c59

Subscribe to this mod's changes

deconstruct is a skill published in the GitHub repository jamesgray-ai/handsonai-plugins (8 stars, last pushed 22d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 171 tokens to every session and 11,662 once invoked, about $0.0009 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.

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