schema-design

schema-design is a skill for Claude Code from kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg. It costs 91 tokens per session (2,258 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A design guide for deciding how a project's knowledge should be organized, such as facts, rules, stories, or wiki entries. The chosen structure affects how the application and later processing stages are built.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it at the beginning of a knowledge project to choose and refine the content format and schema before extraction and application design.
Why use it?
It removes the risk of extracting information into a format that does not suit the intended application. It also provides a basis for refining the structure as the source material becomes clearer.

Skill for Claude Code

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

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

Good fit Use it at the beginning of a knowledge project to choose and refine the content format and schema before extraction and application design.

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

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg/schema-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg/schema-design.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 91 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,258 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 $0.00091 $0.02258
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.01129
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00452
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00226

Measured 9d ago against content hash da663b2aa229, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

schema-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 9d 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/schema-design/SKILL.md · 133 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 133 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

schema-design

This is the most consequential decision in the knowledge phases. Get it wrong-or-too-rigid and every downstream phase pays for it (an earlier production system is a cautionary tale — see references/sku-regression-case-study.md). Get it right and the rest of the pipeline becomes obvious.

What schema-design is NOT

  • It's not picking from a closed menu. There is no "the John schema." Different projects want different shapes.
  • It's not a one-shot decision. The schema evolves through the early phases as the corpus reveals itself.
  • It's not a JSON spec for the John-equipped agent to autocomplete. It's a taste call the user owns.

The app-type definition cascade

The app-type definition cascade — knowledge format → knowledge schema → app mechanism → build pipeline — has each link constrain the next. Schema is the second link in the chain — downstream of what kind of knowledge and upstream of what the app does. The cascade itself is explained in references/app-type-definition-cascade.md and applied in [[plan-md-authoring]]; this skill is where the schema link gets designed.

You make schema decisions only after the format decision is roughly settled. Reverse the order and you end up over-fitting the schema to the corpus, then re-doing it when the runtime asks for something the schema can't represent.

Before you design — read the corpus first

John's job is to teach schema design, not hand you a schema: abstract the methodology from prior projects — what to consider, when and how to iterate — and apply it here. That methodology starts with reading what's actually in the corpus before sketching a schema. Pre-designing in a vacuum is how you get over-fit or under-specified schemas.

Practical method:

  1. Read [[parsing]]'s output. Walk through a representative sample of <project>/.john/parsed/*/doc.md (don't read everything; read enough to recognize patterns).
  2. Ask survey questions as you read:
    • Is the corpus mostly atomic statements (factual)?
    • Mostly prescriptive how-to (procedural / rules)?
    • Mostly narrative (storylines / characters / scenes)?
    • Heavy on connections between entities (relational / wiki)?
    • Mixed? Which mix?
  3. Notice structural features the corpus already exhibits: causal chains, taxonomies, glossary-shaped terminology, recurring entities, citations, decision flowcharts.
  4. Cross-reference user intent from PLAN.md's project intent + app mechanism (the app-type definition cascade). A corpus full of facts might suit a quiz app (procedural runtime) OR a wiki (browsable runtime); user intent decides.
  5. THEN sketch the schema to fit (corpus shape × user intent), not to fit a default.

Read the full file on GitHub · 133 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 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. 9d ago First seen · 133 lines · 91 tokens per session scan A da663b2aa229

Subscribe to this mod's changes

schema-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg (9 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 91 tokens to every session and 2,258 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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