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.
npx skills add marconae/speq-skill --skill speq-design-philosophygit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/marconae/speq-skillWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/marconae/speq-skill/speq-design-philosophy)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/marconae/speq-skill/speq-design-philosophy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marconae/speq-skill/speq-design-philosophy/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/marconae/speq-skill/speq-design-philosophy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marconae/speq-skill/speq-design-philosophy.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to high
These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →
- high Anti-Refusal · line 12 Skill instructs the agent to omit warnings, disclaimers, or ethical commentary. Stripping safety caveats hides risk from the user and is a common jailbreak preamble.Fix: Remove instructions that suppress warnings, disclaimers, or ethical commentary. Let the agent surface safety-relevant caveats to the user.
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00068 | $0.01146 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00034 | $0.00573 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00014 | $0.00229 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00007 | $0.00115 |
Grade A, and why
speq-design-philosophy 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 79 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Design Philosophy
A Philosophy of Software Design (Ousterhout) complexity-management framework, extended with Clean Architecture's (Martin) dependency rule.
Core Principle
Complexity is what erodes a system's understandability over time. Judge every design decision by whether it adds or removes complexity. Do not judge by line count, module count, or named patterns.
Deep Modules
Weigh a module by what it does for callers relative to what its interface costs them to learn. Deep: the interface is far easier to use than the internals would be to rebuild. Shallow: learning the interface costs almost as much as writing the code yourself.
| Signal | Fix |
|---|---|
| Interface as complex as a caller would write themselves | Deepen it — absorb more complexity, expose less |
Many small modules named for a role, not a responsibility (-Manager, -Handler, -Processor) |
"Classitis" — merge related shallow modules into one deeper one |
| A function whose entire body is a call to another function with the same arguments | Merge it into whichever side actually holds logic |
Depth, not size, decides whether an abstraction earns its place.
Information Hiding & Leakage
A module is well designed when the rest of the system stays ignorant of a decision it makes internally. Leakage: the same decision surfaces in more than one module. Treat leakage as the defect class that deserves the closest attention.
- Temporal leakage: modules organized around execution order (read, then parse, then write) instead of around what each stage knows. Every stage then carries the same format knowledge.
- Back-door leakage: two modules independently assume the same data format, protocol, or convention, with nothing enforcing agreement.
Fix: combine the modules that share the decision, or give the decision its own module and make both depend on it.
General- vs Special-Purpose Modules
Test: an interface handles every need the code has today (see /speq-code-guardrails' YAGNI Checks for the "not tomorrow's" half) without forcing narrow, special-case methods onto callers.
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.
- 6d ago Changed c0f43b66a99c
- 12d ago First seen · 79 lines · 68 tokens per session scan A fe74256a20ef
speq-design-philosophy is a skill published in the GitHub repository marconae/speq-skill (50 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 1,146 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.
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workflow-start
Primary entry point for the spec-superflow state-machine workflow. Invoke when the user is inside an active spec-superflow change directory (look for .spec-superflow.yaml, changes/ /, proposal.md, specs/, design.md, tasks.md, or execution-contract.md) and asks to start, continue, resume, implement, plan, or figure out…
bug-investigator
Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior during spec-superflow execution, before proposing fixes. Invoked automatically when build-executor hits a blockage.
release-archivist
Close out a spec-superflow change with verification, summary, and archive readiness. Invoke when implementation is complete, verification is underway, or the user asks for a final wrap-up.
contract-builder
Convert approved planning artifacts into an execution contract. Invoke when the user wants to start building, asks to move from planning to implementation, or when execution-contract.md is missing or stale.
need-explorer
Clarify intent, scope, constraints, and success criteria before artifact creation. Invoke when the request is fuzzy, the user is comparing options, or the workflow needs a stable change definition before writing artifacts.