mk:api-design-principles

mk:api-design-principles is a skill for Claude Code from ngocsangyem/MeowKit. It costs 59 tokens per session (1,845 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for designing shared interfaces between software components, including REST, GraphQL, RPC, and event-based APIs. An API contract defines the data, errors, permissions, and compatibility rules consumers can rely on.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design or review API schemas, endpoint behavior, pagination, error handling, authorization requirements, deprecation plans, and API documentation.
Why use it?
It helps prevent inconsistent endpoints and breaking changes by checking existing consumers and conventions before proposing a contract.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

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/ngocsangyem/meowkit/api-design-principles
Any agent
npx skills add ngocsangyem/MeowKit --skill api-design-principles
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ngocsangyem/MeowKit

Made for: Claude Code.

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 mk:api-design-principles

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ngocsangyem/meowkit/api-design-principles.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ngocsangyem/meowkit/api-design-principles)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ngocsangyem/meowkit/api-design-principles"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ngocsangyem/meowkit/api-design-principles.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 59 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,845 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 5.1 $0.00059 $0.01845
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00923
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00369
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00185

Measured 2d ago against content hash cb8ebbf3b8c6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

mk:api-design-principles 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.

.claude/skills/api-design-principles/SKILL.md · 152 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 152 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

API Design Principles

Durable interface contracts. Discover the existing contract before proposing a new one.

Ownership

Owner Owns Does NOT own
mk:api-design-principles Interface contract: resource/type/message shape, error and authorization requirements, compatibility and deprecation, consumer discovery Implementation, persistence, security verdict, release
mk:backend-development End-to-end backend change: discovery, classification, service/handler/integration work Contract authorship, schema/SQL, security verdict, deploy
mk:database Data invariants, schema, migration and recovery, query/index evidence, ORM boundary API contract, authorization verdict, infrastructure execution
mk:devops Infrastructure-as-code, containers, CI, runtime config, deployment safety design, rollback, incident diagnosis Deploy approval and execution, security verdict, code root-cause, schema semantics

Routing rules — identical in all four skills:

  • Contract-only API question → mk:api-design-principles, even in the middle of a task owned by another skill. "Contract" means what a consumer can observe: field set, error shape, status semantics, pagination, versioning. Extending an endpoint without changing any of those is not a contract change.
  • End-to-end backend change → mk:backend-development, which invokes the API skill only when a new, public, or breaking contract is in scope.
  • A message-based change (event, webhook, RPC) splits: the message contract belongs to mk:api-design-principles; the producer or consumer implementation belongs to mk:backend-development.
  • Schema, migration, query, index, or ORM work → mk:database. No other skill writes a migration or generic SQL.
  • Infrastructure, containers, delivery, or deployment safety → mk:devops.
  • An unscoped performance request is triaged by evidence, never by guess: mk:backend-development locates where the time actually goes, then hands a query or index question to mk:database and a capacity or runtime question to mk:devops. No skill invents the target.
  • Code root cause → mk:investigate. mk:devops owns the operational picture — what changed, where it fails, which signal proves it — and hands the defect over.
  • An auth-sensitive change: the owning skill states the requirement; the security workflow owns the verdict.
  • Any production effect → mk:ship or a human.

Read the full file on GitHub · 152 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. 2d ago First seen · 152 lines · 59 tokens per session scan A cb8ebbf3b8c6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

mk:api-design-principles is a skill published in the GitHub repository ngocsangyem/MeowKit (14 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 59 tokens to every session and 1,845 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 2026-09-03.

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