phase-design

phase-design is a skill for Claude Code from kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg. It costs 69 tokens per session (2,363 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for designing project phases in PLAN.md for John projects. Phases are suggested groups of work with a clear purpose and files or other evidence showing when the group is done.

In plain words
What is it for?
Creating, evaluating, or revising project phases and defining concrete completion checks for each phase.
Why use it?
It helps break large projects into useful, verifiable stages without treating the stages as rigid rules.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Part of the john plugin — 28 skills, 5 commands, 5 agents, 3 hooks shipped together

Good fit Creating, evaluating, or revising project phases and defining concrete completion checks for each phase.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg/phase-design
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.

Any agent
npx skills add kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg --skill phase-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install john, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 28 skills, 5 commands, 5 agents, 3 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 phase-design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg/phase-design/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg/phase-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg/phase-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg/phase-design/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for phase-design

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg/phase-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg/phase-design.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 69 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,363 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 $0.00069 $0.02363
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.01182
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00473
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00236

Measured 8d ago against content hash c25882ca0597, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

phase-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 8d 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/joharnessburg/skills/phase-design/SKILL.md · 134 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 134 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

phase-design

You are the John-equipped agent designing phases for the user's project. The phases will live in <project>/PLAN.md and drive every loop iteration via [[ralph-loop]].

Phases are suggestions, not enforcement. John's stance is phases-as-skills with template override room — the engine doesn't gate on phase boundaries; the floor is disk-verifiable artifacts (see [[workspace-discipline]]). You're designing scaffolding that helps work decompose cleanly, not laws that punish deviation. Templates may radically reshape the phase list; users may request changes mid-flight; corpora may surprise you. Stay wide.

A phase is a unit of work with three properties:

  1. An intent. One sentence. "Extract all rules from the regulation corpus." "Build the runtime UI shell." If you can't say the intent in a sentence, the phase is too big or too unclear.
  2. Disk-verifiable done criteria. Specific paths/files that must exist, with optional content checks. Not "feels done." Not "the agent says it's done." See [[workspace-discipline]]. For fan-out phases that produce knowledge entries, the done criteria should name an expected entry count or range (derived from the corpus survey, recorded in PLAN.md) — that number feeds the reducer's deterministic count gate (reduce_events.py --expect-entries, see [[event-log-and-reducer]]), which refuses phase advancement on a large shortfall.
  3. A clean compaction point. When you finish a phase, the world is in a state where context could compact (or the session could restart) and the next iteration could pick up cleanly from disk.

Phases that don't have all three are not phases — they're tasks within a phase, or arbitrary stopping points, or something else.

How many phases

For the knowledge phases (knowledge engineering): typically 4-8 phases. The starter from John (parse → survey → schema-design → chunk → extract → rewrite → package) is 7. You can drop or merge — for example, a corpus that arrives pre-chunked skips "parse" and "chunk."

Read the full file on GitHub · 134 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. 8d ago First seen · 134 lines · 69 tokens per session scan A c25882ca0597

Subscribe to this mod's changes

phase-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg (9 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 69 tokens to every session and 2,363 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.

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