shape-up

shape-up is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills. It costs 263 tokens per session (3,413 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A product development method for deciding what to build and ship within a fixed amount of time. It uses shaped work proposals, called pitches or packages, and a dedicated decision process for choosing which ones to fund.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to shape product bets, review pitches or packages, run a betting table, and decide which projects are ready for a focused delivery cycle.
Why use it?
It helps teams avoid endless planning and unclear feature requests. The method makes the problem, expected work, time available, and excluded work explicit before development starts.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to shape product bets, review pitches or packages, run a betting table, and decide which projects are ready for a focused delivery cycle.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/shape-up
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 marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills --skill shape-up
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 shape-up

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/shape-up/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/shape-up)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/shape-up"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/shape-up/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 shape-up

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/shape-up"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills/shape-up.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 263 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,413 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 $0.00263 $0.03413
Opus 5 $0.00131 $0.01707
Sonnet 5 $0.00053 $0.00683
Haiku 4.5 $0.00026 $0.00341

Measured 10d ago against content hash 07d4d80bb12d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

shape-up 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 10d 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.

skills/shape-up/SKILL.md · 109 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 109 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Shape Up

Ryan Singer's product development method — distilled from the 2019 book Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters (37signals, free in full at basecamp.com/shapeup) plus Singer's post-Basecamp evolution of the method at Felt Presence since 2020 (the Framing prelude introduced in 2022, the "Pitch → Package" rename, the Shaping in Real Life material adapting the method for non-Basecamp companies, and the 2025 Common Pitfalls piece cataloguing adoption failure modes).

This skill helps you work in Singer's method with fidelity — not to blend it with Scrum or Kanban or Continuous Discovery. Shape Up defines itself against those. Blending them collapses the contrast that gives the method its edge.

The book is free online in its entirety. If the user wants the source, send them to basecamp.com/shapeup — no paywall, no summary needed.

When this skill activates

Use this skill when the user is:

  • Shaping a product bet (writing a pitch or "package") — problem, appetite, solution, rabbit holes, no-gos.
  • Critiquing a pitch/package written by someone else against Singer's five ingredients.
  • Running or fixing a Betting Table.
  • Deciding whether an idea is worth a six-week bet, or whether it needs more framing first.
  • Planning a six-week cycle + two-week cool-down cadence, or explaining it to a team new to the method.
  • Drawing or reading Hill Charts (uphill = figuring out, downhill = executing) and diagnosing stuck dots.
  • Hitting a circuit-breaker moment — the cycle is ending and the work isn't done — and being tempted to extend.
  • Sizing an appetite (small batch = 1–2 weeks; big batch = full 6 weeks) rather than estimating.
  • Considering ripping out their backlog or arguing for "no backlog" in their org.
  • Trying to adopt Shape Up in a non-Basecamp company (typical B2B SaaS, separate designers/engineers/PMs, legacy systems).
  • Distinguishing Framing (is this worth solving?) from Shaping (what's a viable solution?) — the 2022+ Singer addition.
  • Arguing about whether Shape Up applies to their situation (feature bets: yes; bugs and maintenance: no; pre-PMF: probably not).

Read the full file on GitHub · 109 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. 10d ago First seen · 109 lines · 263 tokens per session scan A 07d4d80bb12d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

shape-up is a skill published in the GitHub repository marcos-sponton/frameworks-as-skills (1 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 263 tokens to every session and 3,413 once invoked, about $0.0013 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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