api-design

api-design is a skill for Claude Code from marcoguillermaz/Tierward. It costs 0 tokens per session (3,958 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A checklist for reviewing the design of web APIs, which are interfaces that let programs exchange requests and data. It covers routes, HTTP methods, responses, errors, pagination, validation, and access boundaries.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when adding or changing API routes to audit names, request and response formats, status codes, filtering, sorting, pagination, validation, and authentication boundaries.
Why use it?
It helps find inconsistent or confusing API behavior before it affects clients and other services.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: model in frontmatter; mentions subagents.

Part of the tierward plugin — 29 skills, 1 command, 1 hook, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Use it when adding or changing API routes to audit names, request and response formats, status codes, filtering, sorting, pagination, validation, and authentication boundaries.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install tierward, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 29 skills, 1 command, 1 hook, 1 MCP server.

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 api-design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marcoguillermaz/tierward/api-design.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/marcoguillermaz/tierward/api-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/marcoguillermaz/tierward/api-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marcoguillermaz/tierward/api-design.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,958 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 $0.00000 $0.03958
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.01979
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00792
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00396

Measured 8d ago against content hash 837140d75ebb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, 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 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.

packages/cli/templates/tier-l/.claude/skills/api-design/SKILL.md · 250 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 250 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Scope: endpoint naming, HTTP verbs, resource modeling, response shapes, error codes, field naming, filtering/sorting conventions, pagination, validation, auth/authz boundary clarity. Out of scope: auth implementation → /security-audit | performance → /perf-audit | DB schema → /skill-db. Default mode: audit (no code changes). Modes: audit | remediation (propose plan, no changes) | apply (make focused fixes). All audit findings are persisted to docs/refactoring-backlog.md via the backlog write-once protocol (.claude/rules/backlog-protocol.md).

Configuration

Placeholder Description Example
[SITEMAP_OR_ROUTE_LIST] File listing all API routes with method, path, roles, and grouping docs/sitemap.md, docs/routes.md

Unfilled behavior: if [SITEMAP_OR_ROUTE_LIST] is not filled, the skill discovers routes by scanning the project's route handler directories. Announce the discovered routes before proceeding.

Status code reference (source: MDN + RFC 9457)

  • 400 - malformed request: bad JSON, schema validation failure, missing required field
  • 401 - not authenticated (no valid session)
  • 403 - authenticated but lacks permission
  • 404 - resource not found
  • 409 - valid request conflicts with current server state (e.g., approving an already-approved record, duplicate unique value)
  • 422 - semantically invalid data that passes schema validation but violates a business rule
  • 500 - unexpected server error (no internal details in response)

Step 0 - Target and mode resolution

Parse $ARGUMENTS for target: and mode: tokens.

Target:

Pattern Meaning
target:section:export Only export/bulk routes (example)
target:section:<other> Resolve by reading [SITEMAP_OR_ROUTE_LIST] API routes section, filtering for routes whose path or group label contains <other>. Announce the resolved route list before proceeding.
No argument Full audit - ALL API routes across the entire codebase. Maximum depth.

Read the full file on GitHub · 250 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. 8d ago First seen · 250 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 837140d75ebb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

api-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository marcoguillermaz/Tierward (4 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 3,958 tokens. 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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