api-design

A guide to designing HTTP APIs, which let software exchange requests and data, using REST or GraphQL. It focuses on clear contracts, meaning the documented rules clients rely on, and on changing those rules without breaking existing users.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when adding or reviewing an endpoint or OpenAPI/GraphQL schema, choosing REST versus GraphQL, planning versions, designing pagination or idempotency keys, or mapping application errors to HTTP responses.
Why use it?
It reduces surprises for teams and applications that depend on an API. It helps prevent breaking changes and gives consistent approaches to errors, pagination, retries, and repeated requests.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 84 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,928 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 $0.00084 $0.02928
Opus 5 $0.00042 $0.01464
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00586
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00293

Measured yesterday against content hash 02f66d3da7fb, 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 yesterday.

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.

src/core/skills/api-design/SKILL.md · 233 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 233 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

API Design — REST + GraphQL Contracts

A practical guide to designing APIs that consumers can build against without surprises. Stack-agnostic; concrete patterns target this project's stack (Go+Fiber for the business backend, Python+FastAPI for the AI adapter, React Native client).

When to Use This Skill

  • Adding the first endpoint to a service — the contract you ship now will outlive three implementations.
  • Reviewing an OpenAPI / GraphQL schema PR before merge.
  • Adding a v2 version of a live endpoint without breaking v1 clients.
  • Debating REST vs GraphQL for a new bounded context.
  • Designing pagination, idempotency, rate-limit responses, batch endpoints.
  • Mapping domain errors (from a use case in your hexagonal architecture) to HTTP responses.

Skip when: writing internal-only RPCs that have one caller and you control both sides — use whatever's fastest.

The Contract Is the Product

Three rules that override everything else:

  1. Consumers cannot read your code. They read the contract. If the contract is ambiguous, the consumer guesses wrong, and you find out in production.
  2. Breaking changes are expensive forever. Every consumer must coordinate. Plan as if you can't break things — because at scale, you can't.
  3. The use case shape is sacred. The API shape is negotiable. Don't bend domain operations to match HTTP idioms. Translate at the adapter boundary (per hexagonal-architecture).

REST vs GraphQL — Decision

Pick REST when:

  • Consumers are heterogeneous (mobile + web + 3rd-party). REST is the universal lingua franca.
  • Endpoints map cleanly to resources. CRUD-like dominates.
  • You need HTTP-native caching (CDN, proxies, conditional GET).
  • You want minimal client tooling (no codegen mandatory).

Pick GraphQL when:

  • Single consumer team or tightly-coupled clients (e.g. one mobile app + one web app from same team).
  • Heavy over-fetching with REST: clients pull 12 fields and use 2.
  • Frequent shape evolution that doesn't justify a v2 endpoint.
  • You're willing to invest in DataLoader, persisted queries, query complexity limits.

Read the full file on GitHub · 233 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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. yesterday First seen · 233 lines · 84 tokens per session scan A 02f66d3da7fb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

api-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository kouroshez/coding-os (6 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 84 tokens to every session and 2,928 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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