feature-design

A planning guide for writing detailed design documents before making a significant software change, such as a new feature, migration, or architectural change.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to document feature designs, compare technical approaches, plan migrations, and record decisions for work that affects several parts of a codebase.
Why use it?
It prevents large changes from starting without agreed decisions, alternatives, scope, and implementation steps.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/markerikson/opencode-config-example/feature-design
Any agent
npx skills add markerikson/opencode-config-example --skill feature-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/markerikson/opencode-config-example

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,690 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00041 $0.01690
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00845
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00338
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00169

Measured 2d ago against content hash b451b802d5ed, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

feature-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 2d 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.

config/skill/feature-design/SKILL.md · 327 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 327 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Feature Design Skill

Create detailed design documents for features, migrations, or architectural changes that require upfront planning.

When to Use This Skill

  • Planning a significant new feature (multi-day implementation)
  • Designing a migration strategy
  • Evaluating multiple technical approaches
  • Integration work between systems
  • Changes that affect multiple parts of the codebase

Don't use for:

  • Small features or bug fixes
  • Strategic project context (use project-overview skill)
  • Tracking ongoing work (use development-plan skill)

File Location

Feature designs typically live alongside the development plan:

dev-plans/
└── {project}/
    ├── features/
    │   ├── 2025-12-29-user-auth-redesign.md
    │   └── 2025-12-15-api-migration.md
    └── current-focus.md

Naming: YYYY-MM-DD-feature-name.md

Document Template

Title and Metadata

# Design: [Feature Name]

**Status:** [Draft / In Review / Approved / Superseded]
**Created:** [Date]
**Updated:** [Date if modified]

---

Status notes:

  • Use Superseded when the design was replaced by a different approach (link to new doc)
  • Update the Updated date when making significant changes

Executive Summary

One paragraph (3-5 sentences) describing:

  • What this feature/change is
  • Why it's needed
  • The recommended approach (if determined)
## Executive Summary

[Concise description of the feature, the problem it solves, and the high-level approach. Reader should understand the "what" and "why" after this paragraph.]

Current State / Problem

Describe what exists today and why it's insufficient.

## Current State

### How It Works Today

[Describe the current implementation, data flow, or architecture]

### Problems

- [Problem 1 - be specific about the pain point]
- [Problem 2]
- [Problem 3]

### Why Change Now?

[What triggered this work? New requirements, tech debt, performance issues?]

Include when helpful:

  • Code snippets showing current patterns
  • Diagrams of current data flow
  • Links to relevant code locations

Read the full file on GitHub · 327 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. 2d ago First seen · 327 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A b451b802d5ed

Subscribe to this mod's changes

feature-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository markerikson/opencode-config-example (44 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 1,690 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

next-cache-components-adoption

Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…

vercel/next.js · 95 tokens

babysit-pr

Babysit a GitHub pull request after creation by continuously polling review comments, CI checks/workflow runs, and mergeability state until the PR is merged/closed or user help is required. Diagnose failures, retry likely flaky failures up to 3 times, auto-fix/push branch-related issues when appropriate, and keep…

openai/codex · 114 tokens

imagegen

Generate or edit raster images when the task benefits from AI-created bitmap visuals such as photos, illustrations, textures, sprites, mockups, or transparent-background cutouts. Use when Codex should create a brand-new image, transform an existing image, or derive visual variants from references, and the output…

openai/codex · 113 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens

next-cache-components-optimizer

Drive a Next.js route to instant navigation by setting up an agentic loop, under Cache Components / PPR, on initial load (hard navigation) and client-side navigation (soft navigation). Encode the goal as a failing @next/playwright instant() e2e and work it to green, one verified route at a time; the shipped test then…

vercel/next.js · 170 tokens