design-discovery

design-discovery is a skill for Claude Code from Owl-Listener/designpowers. It costs 45 tokens per session (1,780 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A discovery process for understanding the problem, users and constraints before designing an interface or changing user-facing behaviour.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before creating features, components or interfaces, especially when the user needs to approve a design brief first.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of building a polished solution to the wrong problem.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the designpowers plugin — 36 skills, 10 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it before creating features, components or interfaces, especially when the user needs to approve a design brief first.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/owl-listener/designpowers/design-discovery
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 Owl-Listener/designpowers --skill design-discovery
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Owl-Listener/designpowers

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install designpowers, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 36 skills, 10 agents, 1 hook.

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 design-discovery

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designpowers/design-discovery"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designpowers/design-discovery.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 45 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,780 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 pass 7 Sept 2026
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 $0.00045 $0.01780
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00890
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00356
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00178

Measured 9d ago against content hash 9c9c3454acfd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-discovery 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 9d 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/design-discovery/SKILL.md · 165 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 165 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design Discovery

Discovery is where design begins. Before pixels, before wireframes, before any visual decisions — understand the problem. This skill ensures you never design the wrong thing well.

Welcome Gate

BEFORE running discovery, check whether the Designpowers welcome sequence has been shown this session. If the user has not yet seen the welcome (the bird, the greeting, and the walkthrough offer), you MUST invoke the using-designpowers skill FIRST and complete the welcome sequence before returning here. The bird must appear before any work begins. No exceptions.

The Rule

DO NOT proceed to any design, UI, or implementation work until discovery is complete and the user has approved the design brief.

Discovery Modes

Quick Discovery (for POCs and small tasks)

When the user says "proof of concept", "POC", "quick", "small", or the task is clearly exploratory:

  1. Keep it light. Ask a few essentials in a conversational way — not as a numbered checklist:

    "Quick version: what's the problem, who's it for, and what does success feel like? If you've got a design system or any references you love, throw those in too."

  2. Write the brief immediately from their answers — don't ask follow-up rounds
  3. Present the brief for approval in one block (not section by section)
  4. Create design-state.md in the project root immediately after brief approval

Quick discovery should take one user message of answers, not three. But the question should still feel like a person asking, not a form.

Full Discovery (for products and complex tasks)

When the task is a full product, involves multiple stakeholders, or the user explicitly wants depth — use the full process below.

Process

Step 1: Understand the Context

Before asking questions, gather what already exists:

  • Read any existing design documents, specs, or briefs in the project
  • Check for an existing design system, component library, or style guide
  • Look at the current state of what the user is working on
  • Identify the platform, tech stack, and any constraints

Read the full file on GitHub · 165 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. 9d ago First seen · 165 lines · 45 tokens per session scan A 9c9c3454acfd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-discovery is a skill published in the GitHub repository Owl-Listener/designpowers (243 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 45 tokens to every session and 1,780 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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