skill-writing-plans

skill-writing-plans is a skill for Claude Code from nyldn/claude-octopus. It costs 21 tokens per session (2,192 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of instructions for writing detailed implementation plans that another developer can follow without prior project context.

In plain words
What is it for?
Planning multi-step coding work before implementation, including test-driven development (TDD), where tests guide the code design.
Why use it?
It turns a broad feature request into specific files, code, tests, and verification steps.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code.

Needs its repository: it reads a path above its own folder, which exists only inside the repository. The line is Expected: `Cannot find module '../src/validators/email'`.

Part of the octo plugin — 70 skills, 106 commands, 10 agents, 18 hooks shipped together

Good fit Planning multi-step coding work before implementation, including test-driven development (TDD), where tests guide the code design.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
About the project

Claude Octopus is an orchestration project that sends research, design, and coding tasks to Claude Code and other AI model providers so their results can be compared. Developers use it for multi-model work, disagreement detection, reviews, persistent context, and an optional workflow that moves from discovery through delivery. The catalogue entries are its commands, skills, agents, instructions, hooks, plugins, and settings.

nyldn/claude-octopus · 4,061 stars · on GitHub · reddit.com

Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nyldn/claude-octopus
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-writing-plans

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install octo, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 70 skills, 106 commands, 10 agents, 18 hooks.

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 skill-writing-plans

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-writing-plans/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-writing-plans)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-writing-plans"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-writing-plans/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 skill-writing-plans

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-writing-plans"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-writing-plans.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 21 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,192 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Excessive Agency · line 326
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00021 $0.02192
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.01096
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00438
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00219

Measured 3d ago against content hash ca27357798a7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

skill-writing-plans 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 3d 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/skill-writing-plans/SKILL.md · 359 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 359 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Writing Plans

Load skills/blocks/engineering-method-selection.md from the installed plugin and apply only the methods relevant to this task. Preserve this entry point's execution contract and output format. Read referenced skills as instructions; do not invoke the current command recursively or add provider calls from a seat.

MANDATORY COMPLIANCE — DO NOT SKIP

When this skill is invoked, you MUST produce a full implementation plan following the structure below. You are PROHIBITED from:

  • Skipping the plan and jumping straight to implementation
  • Producing a vague outline instead of the zero-context plan format
  • Deciding the task is "simple enough" to not need a plan
  • Omitting file paths, complete code, test instructions, or verification steps

The user asked for a plan, not an implementation. Write the plan first.


Your first output line MUST be: 🐙 **CLAUDE OCTOPUS ACTIVATED** - Implementation Planning

Overview

Write comprehensive implementation plans assuming the engineer has zero context for the codebase and questionable taste.

Document everything: which files to touch, complete code, how to test, how to verify.

Principles: DRY. YAGNI. TDD. Frequent commits.

Decisions before tasks

Build a dependency graph for unresolved decisions before writing implementation tasks. A decision record contains its question, evidence required, dependencies, owner, resolution, and the implementation it unblocks. Use the repository's configured tracker. Beads is not an end-user requirement.

Decision states are open, claimed, resolved, superseded, and blocked, mapped to native tracker states or labels. Resolve only from evidence or a recorded human decision. If new evidence invalidates a decision, reopen its dependent work and explain why. A cycle means the work is not ready; recut the decisions rather than marking tasks ready.

Claim through the tracker's atomic operation and read ownership back before writing. If atomic claiming is unavailable, appoint one integrator. Never overwrite another claim. When the tracker fails, save an explicitly unfiled proposal in existing plan storage, stop tracker writes, and never fabricate IDs or migrate a database.

Read the full file on GitHub · 359 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. 3d ago Changed · +24 lines ca27357798a7
  2. 7d ago First seen · 335 lines · 21 tokens per session scan A 55d17f4004fc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-writing-plans is a skill published in the GitHub repository nyldn/claude-octopus (4,061 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 21 tokens to every session and 2,192 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.