name-things

name-things is a skill for Claude Code from mikestangdevs/craft-skills. It costs 93 tokens per session (1,289 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A naming aid for functions, variables, types, files, and modules. It guides names toward the thing's meaning and role instead of vague labels such as “data” or “manager.”

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when creating or renaming code elements, refactoring, or reviewing confusing identifiers. It helps align names with the terms used in the software's subject area.
Why use it?
Unclear names make code harder to read and can hide mistakes, especially when similar values have different roles. Clear names reduce the need to inspect an implementation or add explanatory comments.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the craft-skills plugin — 17 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when creating or renaming code elements, refactoring, or reviewing confusing identifiers. It helps align names with the terms used in the software's subject area.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/name-things
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 mikestangdevs/craft-skills --skill name-things
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mikestangdevs/craft-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install craft-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 17 skills.

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 name-things

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/name-things.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/name-things)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/name-things"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/name-things.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 93 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,289 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 $0.00093 $0.01289
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.00645
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00258
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00129

Measured 8d ago against content hash 89c4aa5c2fe5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

name-things 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.

skills/craft/name-things/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.

Name Things

The failure mode this fixes

Bad names are the cheapest bug to introduce and the most expensive to live with. data, handle, process, manager, info, util, temp, obj — every one is a place where the author gave up on saying what the thing is. Agents are especially prone to this: they generate plausible-but-vague names at scale. The result is code that's technically correct and cognitively exhausting.

This skill makes names carry their weight: a good name tells you what something is and what role it plays, so you don't have to read the implementation to use it.

When to Use This Skill

  • Naming a new function, variable, type, file, or module
  • Renaming during a refactor or extraction
  • A review keeps tripping over what something means
  • Two identifiers are confusingly similar (user vs userData vs userInfo)
  • You're about to write a comment to explain a name — the name should do that job

Don't use when: the name is already domain-standard and clear (id, i in a tight loop, well-known abbreviations like url, db). Framework-idiomatic names in their conventional position (req/res in an Express handler, ctx, self/cls) are also exempt — fighting the ecosystem costs more than it clarifies. Don't rename for the sake of renaming.

Instructions

1. Ask what role the thing plays

Names encode role. Before naming, classify:

  • Boolean → reads as a question/state: isReady, hasAccess, shouldRetry (not flag, status, check). Phrase it positively — isEnabled, not isNotDisabled; negatives double up at the call site (!isNotReady)
  • Function → verb phrase naming the effect: chargeCard, parseWebhook, evictStaleSessions (not handle, process, doWork)
  • Collection → plural noun: pendingInvoices (not list, arr, data)
  • Transformation → name the output, not the act: cents not convert, normalizedEmail not fixEmail

2. Run the ban list

Reject any name that is, or contains, a filler word unless it's genuinely the most precise term:

Read the full file on GitHub · 86 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. 8d ago First seen · 86 lines · 93 tokens per session scan A 89c4aa5c2fe5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

name-things is a skill published in the GitHub repository mikestangdevs/craft-skills (4 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 93 tokens to every session and 1,289 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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