design

design is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from JHostalek/dotclaude. It costs 20 tokens per session (1,143 once invoked), scanned A, original, CC0-1.0.

A design-planning guide for creating several genuinely different implementation approaches before choosing one.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when a feature or system needs competing architecture or implementation proposals for a deliberate decision.
Why use it?
It helps teams make real trade-offs instead of comparing small variations of the same solution. Independent exploration reduces the chance that the first idea limits the discussion.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the jhostalek-skills plugin — 32 skills, 12 agents 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/jhostalek/dotclaude/design
Any agent
npx skills add JHostalek/dotclaude --skill design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JHostalek/dotclaude

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install jhostalek-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 32 skills, 12 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

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jhostalek/dotclaude/design.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jhostalek/dotclaude/design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jhostalek/dotclaude/design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jhostalek/dotclaude/design.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 20 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,143 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 $0.00020 $0.01143
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00571
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00229
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00114

Measured 5d ago against content hash 307a73505387, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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.

skills/design/SKILL.md · 88 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 88 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

problem = $ARGUMENTS

Senior Design Orchestrator. Purpose: produce genuinely orthogonal approaches — different core mechanisms, not surface variants of one idea — so the user can make a real tradeoff decision rather than choose between disguised versions of the same thing.

Invoking this skill is the authorization to fan out — the explorer panel is the mechanism, so spawn without asking. The caps below are the damper.

Governing principles

  • Ideation ≠ filtering. Diverge first, constrain later — mixing the two kills divergence before it starts.
  • Diversity comes from structure, not instruction. Independent clean contexts + distinct reasoning methods + unique provocations make convergence structurally hard. Instruction alone ("be creative") is insufficient.
  • Don't refine approaches in your own context. The explorers' independent contexts created the diversity; merging revisions into your context destroys it. Send feedback back; let explorers revise in place.

Scale to problem complexity

  • Quick (simple/bounded): skip defamiliarize, 3 explorers, one synthesis.
  • Standard (default): defamiliarize, 4-5 explorers, one synthesis + optional gap-fill.
  • Deep (high-stakes/ambiguous): defamiliarize, 6-8 explorers, multiple synthesis rounds.

Scale up if user signals high stakes or defamiliarize reveals hidden complexity.

Defamiliarize

Name the 2-3 obvious solutions first — you can't escape defaults you haven't named. Then reframe through these lenses (each yields a reframing, not a solution):

  • Step-Back: abstract class of problem this belongs to, domain details stripped.
  • Inversion: worst possible approach; which assumptions might be wrong.
  • Distant Analogy: unrelated domain (biology, logistics, game theory) with the same structural shape.
  • Constraint Removal: ideal w/ no constraints; ideal w/ the primary constraint 10x tighter.

Reframings seed the explorers — not the solutions. Run all four.

Diverge

Explorer Agent file Reasoning style
Forward Build-Up forward-build-up.md Build up from smallest viable unit
Backward from Ideal backward-from-ideal.md Start from perfect outcome, work backward
Constraint-First constraint-first.md Solve hardest constraints first
Analogical Transfer analogical-transfer.md Map from a well-solved problem in another domain
Elimination elimination.md Remove everything unnecessary
Adversarial adversarial.md Attack the obvious solution, build what survives
Composition composition.md Compose existing proven primitives
Temporal temporal.md Design a trajectory across time, not a single state
Stakeholder stakeholder.md Design for conflicting stakeholder needs simultaneously

Read the full file on GitHub · 88 lines

Files

What ships with it

9 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. 5d ago First seen · 88 lines · 20 tokens per session scan A 307a73505387

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design is a skill published in the GitHub repository JHostalek/dotclaude (11 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed CC0-1.0. It adds 20 tokens to every session and 1,143 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.