design-strategy

design-strategy is a skill for Claude Code from krokoko/cairn. It costs 56 tokens per session (3,506 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A workflow for planning how specific software components should be tested and verified. It creates a verification-strategy.md file with recommended tests, evidence sources, and an implementation roadmap.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan tests and other checks for selected components or an entire codebase, including their testing tools and evidence pipeline.
Why use it?
It turns an existing codebase assessment—or a lightweight codebase review—into concrete verification work. This helps identify components that need stronger evidence before more autonomous changes are allowed.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the software-verification plugin — 3 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to plan tests and other checks for selected components or an entire codebase, including their testing tools and evidence pipeline.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/krokoko/cairn/design-strategy
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 krokoko/cairn --skill design-strategy
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/krokoko/cairn

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install software-verification, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills.

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-strategy

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/krokoko/cairn/design-strategy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/krokoko/cairn/design-strategy.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 56 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,506 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 $0.00056 $0.03506
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.01753
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00701
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00351

Measured 8d ago against content hash 63242341652c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-strategy 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/software-verification/skills/design-strategy/SKILL.md · 299 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 299 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design Verification Strategy

Design a tailored verification strategy for specific components or the full codebase. Produces a verification-strategy.md with per-component recommendations, oracle strategies, evidence pipeline design, and an implementation roadmap.

Workflow

Step 1: Load prior assessment

Search for verification-report.md in the codebase. If it exists, read the component breakdown, maturity tier, and identified gaps.

If no report exists, perform a lightweight discovery:

  • Identify main components/modules from directory structure
  • Check for existing tests, CI, type checking
  • Classify each component by archetype and criticality

Step 2: Scope target components

  • If the user specified a component path or name, focus on that component.
  • Otherwise, prioritize components by: (1) high criticality with low verification, (2) autonomy candidates that need one more layer, (3) components with missing oracles.

Step 3: Apply decision framework

Load references/hybrid-strategies.md for archetype-to-stack mappings. Load references/toolchain-catalog.md and references/toolchain-catalog-ecosystems.md for ecosystem-specific tool recommendations.

For each target component:

  1. Identify archetype: Deterministic lib, CRUD service, distributed/stateful, safety kernel, ML-backed, data pipeline, infrastructure/IaC, legacy monolith, agent-written
  2. Look up recommended stack: From the hybrid strategies reference
  3. Diff current vs recommended: What already exists? What is missing?
  4. Produce specific recommendations:
    • Which tools/libraries to add
    • Which files to create or modify
    • Estimated effort (small/medium/large)
    • Expected impact on verification maturity

Step 4: Design oracle strategy

Load references/oracle-patterns.md.

For each component, recommend the best oracle type:

Component type Recommended oracle approach
Pure functions Exact expected output + property-based
User-facing behavior Executable acceptance criteria (Gherkin/BDD) linked to requirements
API endpoints Schema validation + contract tests
Data pipelines Metamorphic relations + replay
ML models Differential + statistical + human
State machines Model checking + replay
UI components Snapshot + visual regression + human

Read the full file on GitHub · 299 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 · 299 lines · 56 tokens per session scan A 63242341652c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-strategy is a skill published in the GitHub repository krokoko/cairn (14 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 56 tokens to every session and 3,506 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 2026-08-30.