api-design

api-design is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from jeet129/praxis. It costs 122 tokens per session (2,898 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A contract-first method for designing APIs, meaning the interface specification is agreed before implementation. It covers REST, gRPC, and event APIs, including versioning, pagination, idempotency, errors, and deprecation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Writing OpenAPI, Protocol Buffer, or AsyncAPI specifications; defining API behavior; planning version changes; and documenting errors, pagination, and safe repeated requests.
Why use it?
It gives implementers and consumers a shared contract and makes mismatches easier to catch during review.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the praxis plugin — 105 skills, 12 commands, 17 agents, 6 hooks 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/jeet129/praxis/api-design
Any agent
npx skills add jeet129/praxis --skill api-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jeet129/praxis

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install praxis, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 105 skills, 12 commands, 17 agents, 6 hooks.

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/jeet129/praxis/api-design.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeet129/praxis/api-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeet129/praxis/api-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeet129/praxis/api-design.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 122 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,898 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 $0.00122 $0.02898
Opus 5 $0.00061 $0.01449
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00580
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00290

Measured 4d ago against content hash 9eb628802219, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, 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 4d 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/praxis-codex/skills/api-design/SKILL.md · 236 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 236 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

API Design

capability: architecture
domain: backend
state: active
dependencies:
  - engineering-standards
  - requirements-elicitation
  - nfr-definition
triggers:
  - "introducing a new API endpoint, RPC, or event topic"
  - "extending an existing API contract"
  - "versioning or deprecating an existing API"
  - "defining a webhook contract"
  - "designing a public API surface"
outputs:
  - OpenAPI/Proto/AsyncAPI specification file
  - versioning policy
  - deprecation policy
  - pagination/filtering/sorting conventions
  - idempotency strategy per mutation
  - error model (error codes, shape, examples)
consumers:
  - backend-developer (implements against the spec)
  - frontend-developer (consumes the spec for client code)
  - code-review (checks code against the spec)
  - api-documentation generators
references:
  - rest-openapi.md
  - grpc-proto.md
  - asyncapi-events.md
  - graphql.md
  - contract-review.md

Contract-first. The specification is written before implementation begins, reviewed (by the Architecture Challenger and the consuming agent), and locked. The implementation is then a faithful realization of the contract; deviations are caught at code review against the spec.

Reviewing a whole contract baseline (not a single endpoint) — e.g. a surface the SA generated in bulk, possibly after architecture_sign_off — use references/contract-review.md. It is the checklist behind the /review contracts command and covers shared-foundation consistency, evolvability/versioning, REST/gRPC/event hygiene, and the safety/privacy surfaces. Generation is not review: a baseline must be vetted by a different role before slices consume it.

This is one of the highest-leverage skills in the library — APIs that ship without contract-first design accumulate inconsistencies, get redesigned a quarter later, and break consumers in the meantime.

When this skill fires

  • A slice introduces a new endpoint, RPC, event topic, or webhook.
  • An existing contract needs to be extended (new field, new operation).
  • A breaking change is being considered (triggers the versioning + deprecation policy).
  • A client (frontend, mobile, partner) needs the contract before they can plan their work.

Read the full file on GitHub · 236 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files 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. 4d ago First seen · 236 lines · 122 tokens per session scan A 9eb628802219

Subscribe to this mod's changes

api-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository jeet129/praxis (7 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 122 tokens to every session and 2,898 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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