prototype

A throwaway program or set of interface variations built to answer one design question before real implementation begins. It can test either how logic behaves or how a screen should look.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to test state changes, data models, and business rules, or to compare different layouts and visual designs for one page.
Why use it?
It helps reveal whether an idea works before time is spent building production code.

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/nicknisi/claude-plugins/prototype
Any agent
npx skills add nicknisi/claude-plugins --skill prototype
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nicknisi/claude-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 145 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,084 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 $0.00145 $0.01084
Opus 5 $0.00072 $0.00542
Sonnet 5 $0.00029 $0.00217
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00108

Measured 2d ago against content hash 6ee7b6de1090, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

prototype 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/scaffold.ts), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

plugins/essentials/skills/prototype/SKILL.md · 57 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 57 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prototype

A prototype is throwaway code that answers a question. The question decides the shape.

If the user passed arguments, treat them as the question the prototype should answer.

Pick a branch

Identify which question is being answered — from the user's prompt, the arguments, the surrounding code, or by asking if the user is around. The litmus test: if the user could answer the question by looking at a screen, it's UI. If they'd need to push buttons and watch state change, it's logic.

  • "Does this logic / state model feel right?"LOGIC.md. Build a tiny interactive app that pushes the state machine through cases that are hard to reason about on paper.
  • "What should this look like?"UI.md. Generate several radically different UI variations on a single route, switchable via a URL search param and a floating bottom bar.

The two branches produce very different artifacts — getting this wrong wastes the whole prototype. If the question is genuinely ambiguous and the user isn't reachable, default to whichever branch better matches the surrounding code (a backend module → logic; a page or component → UI) and state the assumption at the top of the prototype.

Scaffolder

Before writing boilerplate, run the bundled scaffolder to generate the repetitive parts (switcher component, TUI shell, variant stubs). Then fill in the interesting parts — the actual variants or the domain logic.

# UI prototype: generates PrototypeSwitcher + variant shells
npx tsx ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/prototype/scripts/scaffold.ts ui --variants 3 --framework next --outdir ./src/app/settings

# Logic prototype: generates portable logic module + TUI shell
npx tsx ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/prototype/scripts/scaffold.ts tui --name checkout-flow --outdir ./src/checkout

The scaffolder handles React UI (Next, React Router, Vite) and TypeScript TUI. For other UI frameworks, it creates the directory structure with React components — adapt them to your framework.

Read the full file on GitHub · 57 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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 · 57 lines · 145 tokens per session scan A 6ee7b6de1090

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prototype is a skill published in the GitHub repository nicknisi/claude-plugins (114 stars, last pushed 22d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 145 tokens to every session and 1,084 once invoked, about $0.0007 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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