api-design-principles

api-design-principles is a skill for Claude Code from kumaran-is/claude-code-onboarding. It costs 74 tokens per session (960 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to designing REST API endpoints before writing their implementation. REST is a common way for software systems to communicate over HTTP using URLs, methods, status codes, and structured requests and responses.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan endpoints, choose pagination and caching approaches, define safe retries, and handle batch requests with partial failures.
Why use it?
It helps prevent inconsistent URLs, incorrect HTTP behavior, unreliable retries, and unclear handling of pagination, caching, or bulk operations.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Good fit Use it to plan endpoints, choose pagination and caching approaches, define safe retries, and handle batch requests with partial failures.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kumaran-is/claude-code-onboarding/api-design-principles
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 kumaran-is/claude-code-onboarding --skill api-design-principles
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kumaran-is/claude-code-onboarding

Made for: Claude Code.

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.

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README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kumaran-is/claude-code-onboarding/api-design-principles/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kumaran-is/claude-code-onboarding/api-design-principles)
Your own site
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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 api-design-principles

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kumaran-is/claude-code-onboarding/api-design-principles"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kumaran-is/claude-code-onboarding/api-design-principles.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 74 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 960 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 $0.00074 $0.00960
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.00480
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00192
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00096

Measured 6d ago against content hash 92a0afe77396, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

api-design-principles 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 6d 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.

.claude/skills/api-design-principles/SKILL.md · 86 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 86 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Iron Law

NO API ENDPOINT DESIGN WITHOUT READING reference/rest-design-principles.md FIRST — HTTP semantics, status codes, idempotency, and caching strategies must be agreed before writing implementation code

API Design Principles

Stack-agnostic REST design principles for APIs built with Python FastAPI, NestJS 11.x, or Spring Boot WebFlux 3.5.x. Use this skill during the design phase — before writing controllers or route handlers.

When to Use

  • Designing new REST endpoints from scratch
  • Reviewing whether existing endpoints follow REST conventions
  • Choosing a pagination strategy (offset vs cursor)
  • Adding idempotency keys to mutation endpoints
  • Designing caching strategy (ETags, Cache-Control)
  • Designing bulk/batch endpoints with partial failure handling
  • Running the pre-implementation API design checklist

How This Skill Relates to Others

Skill Scope
api-design-principles (this skill) Design phase — REST semantics, patterns, checklist
openapi-spec-generation Documentation phase — OpenAPI 3.1 spec, developer guide
java-spring-api Implementation — Spring WebFlux controllers, services
nestjs-api Implementation — NestJS modules, controllers, DTOs
python-dev Implementation — FastAPI routes, Pydantic models

Process

Step 1: Run the Pre-Implementation Checklist

Read assets/api-design-checklist.md before designing any endpoint. Focus on:

  • Resource naming and URL structure
  • HTTP method assignment
  • Status codes per operation
  • Pagination strategy choice
  • Versioning strategy

Step 2: Apply REST Design Principles

Read reference/rest-design-principles.md for detailed patterns covering:

  • URL structure and resource naming (plural nouns, shallow nesting)
  • HTTP methods and correct status codes per operation type
  • Pagination — offset-based vs cursor-based, with examples for all 3 stacks
  • Versioning strategies (URL path recommended)
  • Rate limiting headers (X-RateLimit-*)
  • Authentication (Bearer token, 401 vs 403 distinction)
  • Error response format (consistent structure across all 3 stacks)
  • Caching — Cache-Control, ETags, conditional GET (304) — all 3 stacks
  • Idempotency keys — mutation safety for payment and order endpoints — all 3 stacks
  • Bulk operations — batch endpoints with 207 Multi-Status partial failure — all 3 stacks
  • CORS configuration — all 3 stacks
  • Health and monitoring endpoints

Read the full file on GitHub · 86 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 6d ago First seen · 86 lines · 74 tokens per session scan A 92a0afe77396

Subscribe to this mod's changes

api-design-principles is a skill published in the GitHub repository kumaran-is/claude-code-onboarding (35 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 74 tokens to every session and 960 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 2026-09-03.

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