sw-design

sw-design is a skill for Claude Code from Obsidian-Owl/specwright. It costs 29 tokens per session (2,146 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for researching a codebase, designing a software solution, challenging that design, and producing design documents without writing code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create architecture designs, identify affected files and modules, assess failure scope, and hand the design to someone who will implement it.
Why use it?
It helps teams examine existing code and risks before implementation, while leaving an auditable record of the proposed approach.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Good fit Use it to create architecture designs, identify affected files and modules, assess failure scope, and hand the design to someone who will implement it.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/obsidian-owl/specwright/sw-design
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 Obsidian-Owl/specwright --skill sw-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Obsidian-Owl/specwright

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 sw-design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/obsidian-owl/specwright/sw-design/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/obsidian-owl/specwright/sw-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/obsidian-owl/specwright/sw-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/obsidian-owl/specwright/sw-design/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 sw-design

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/obsidian-owl/specwright/sw-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/obsidian-owl/specwright/sw-design.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 29 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,146 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 $0.00029 $0.02146
Opus 5.5 $0.00012 $0.00858
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00006 $0.00429
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00215

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 7992b1b799fd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

sw-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 1mo 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.

core/skills/sw-design/SKILL.md · 166 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 166 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Specwright Design

Goal

Research the codebase, design a solution, challenge it adversarially, and produce design artifacts. Output is a design — not specs, not code. Operates autonomously between research and gate handoff, applying protocols/decision.md for all decisions.

Inputs

  • The user's request (argument or conversation)
  • {projectArtifactsRoot}/CONSTITUTION.md -- practices to follow
  • {projectArtifactsRoot}/CHARTER.md -- vision and invariants
  • {projectArtifactsRoot}/config.json -- project configuration
  • {worktreeStateRoot}/session.json -- current worktree attachment, when present
  • {repoStateRoot}/work/*/workflow.json -- other active works for collision checks
  • The codebase itself

Outputs

When complete, runtime and auditable artifacts exist in both locations:

  • {repoStateRoot}/work/{id}/stage-report.md -- runtime-local design handoff digest with attention-required at the top
  • {workArtifactsRoot}/{id}/design.md -- solution overview, approach, integration points, risk assessment
    • Required section: ## Blast Radius listing: modules/files the design touches, failure propagation scope for each (local/adjacent/systemic), and what the design does NOT change.
  • {workArtifactsRoot}/{id}/context.md -- research findings, file paths, gotchas (travels with downstream agents)
  • design assumptions artifact under {workArtifactsRoot}/{id}/ -- classified assumptions with resolution status
  • {workArtifactsRoot}/{id}/decisions.md -- all autonomous decisions recorded per protocols/decision.md

When warranted: data-model.md, contracts.md, testing-strategy.md, infra.md, migrations.md.

Constraints

Stage boundary (LOW freedom): Follow protocols/stage-boundary.md. Produce design artifacts and research context. NEVER write specs, decompose, implement, branch, or test. After gate handoff, STOP.

Ownership guard (LOW freedom):

  • When the current worktree session is already attached to an existing work, resolve live ownership from session.json, not from branch names alone.
  • If another live top-level worktree owns that work, STOP and point the operator to the explicit /sw-adopt flow rather than mutating design artifacts here.
  • /sw-adopt may attach only the current worktree session. sw-design must never rewrite another worktree's session.json.

Read the full file on GitHub · 166 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. 1mo ago First seen · 166 lines · 29 tokens per session scan A 7992b1b799fd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

sw-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository Obsidian-Owl/specwright (10 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 29 tokens to every session and 2,146 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. 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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