api-design

api-design is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from jamestorrevillas/dev-skills. It costs 65 tokens per session (1,026 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for designing and reviewing APIs, which are interfaces that let software systems exchange requests and data. It covers REST, GraphQL, tRPC, and gRPC, along with routes, schemas, status codes, versioning, and pagination.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design endpoints, choose between API approaches, define HTTP methods and status codes, structure schemas, plan pagination, and review API changes.
Why use it?
It helps choose an API style that fits the clients and system, then define consistent routes and responses. It also addresses common concerns such as authentication, validation, and API contracts.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/jamestorrevillas/dev-skills/api-design
Any agent
npx skills add jamestorrevillas/dev-skills --skill api-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jamestorrevillas/dev-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 api-design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jamestorrevillas/dev-skills/api-design.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jamestorrevillas/dev-skills/api-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jamestorrevillas/dev-skills/api-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jamestorrevillas/dev-skills/api-design.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 65 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,026 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 5.1 $0.00065 $0.01026
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00513
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00205
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00103

Measured 5d ago against content hash abb6b4033f94, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

api-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 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.

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.

.github/skills/api-design/SKILL.md · 154 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 154 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

API Design

Choosing the Right API Type

Type Best For Avoid When
REST Public APIs, CRUD, simple clients, IoT Complex nested data, rapid schema iteration
GraphQL Mobile apps, complex nested data, multiple clients Simple CRUD, small teams new to it
tRPC TypeScript monorepos, internal full-stack TS APIs Non-TypeScript clients, public APIs
gRPC High-performance microservice comms, streaming Browser clients, simple use cases

REST API Design

URL Conventions

GET    /users              ← list
GET    /users/{id}         ← single
POST   /users              ← create
PUT    /users/{id}         ← replace
PATCH  /users/{id}         ← partial update
DELETE /users/{id}         ← delete

# Nested resources
GET    /users/{id}/orders
POST   /users/{id}/orders

# Actions (when REST verbs aren't enough)
POST   /orders/{id}/cancel
POST   /users/{id}/activate

HTTP Status Codes

Code Use When
200 Successful GET, PUT, PATCH
201 Successful POST that creates
204 Successful DELETE (no body)
400 Validation failure, bad request
401 Missing/invalid authentication
403 Authenticated but not authorized
404 Resource not found
409 Conflict (duplicate, version mismatch)
422 Unprocessable entity (semantic errors)
429 Rate limit exceeded
500 Unexpected server error

Response Envelope

// Collection
{
  "data": [...],
  "meta": { "total": 100, "page": 1, "perPage": 20 }
}

// Single resource
{ "data": { "id": "1", "name": "James" } }

// Error
{
  "error": {
    "code": "VALIDATION_ERROR",
    "message": "Validation failed",
    "details": [{ "field": "email", "issue": "Invalid format" }]
  }
}

API Design Principles

Versioning Strategy

# URL versioning (most visible, easiest to route)
/v1/users
/v2/users

# Header versioning (cleaner URLs)
Accept: application/vnd.api+json;version=2
```text

Read the full file on GitHub · 154 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 · 154 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A abb6b4033f94

Subscribe to this mod's changes

api-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository jamestorrevillas/dev-skills (3 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 65 tokens to every session and 1,026 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.