develop-design-rationale

develop-design-rationale is a skill for Claude Code from product-on-purpose/pm-skills. It costs 45 tokens per session (809 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A record of why a user-experience or visual design decision was made. It describes the context, constraints, alternatives, trade-offs, and principles behind the chosen design.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for significant UX decisions, design reviews, competing design options, onboarding, or later updates to a design system.
Why use it?
It preserves the reasoning that a finished design cannot show on its own. Future reviewers and team members can understand the choice without guessing or repeating the discussion.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the pm-skills plugin — 69 skills, 11 commands, 6 agents, 2 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it for significant UX decisions, design reviews, competing design options, onboarding, or later updates to a design system.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/product-on-purpose/pm-skills/develop-design-rationale
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 product-on-purpose/pm-skills --skill develop-design-rationale
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/product-on-purpose/pm-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install pm-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 69 skills, 11 commands, 6 agents, 2 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 develop-design-rationale

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/product-on-purpose/pm-skills/develop-design-rationale/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/product-on-purpose/pm-skills/develop-design-rationale)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/product-on-purpose/pm-skills/develop-design-rationale"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/product-on-purpose/pm-skills/develop-design-rationale/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 develop-design-rationale

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/product-on-purpose/pm-skills/develop-design-rationale"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/product-on-purpose/pm-skills/develop-design-rationale.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 809 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
  • Socket pass 27 Apr 2026
  • Snyk pass 27 Apr 2026
  • 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 73
    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 $0.00045 $0.00809
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00404
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00162
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00081

Measured 9d ago against content hash 853395279e4d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

develop-design-rationale 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/develop-design-rationale/SKILL.md · 78 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 78 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design Rationale

A design rationale document captures the "why" behind design decisions.the context, constraints, alternatives considered, and reasoning that led to a particular solution. While designs themselves show what was built, rationale documents preserve institutional knowledge about why it was built that way.

When to Use

  • When making significant UX decisions that affect user experience
  • Before design reviews to prepare stakeholder discussions
  • When multiple valid approaches exist and the choice needs justification
  • To onboard new team members to existing design decisions
  • When revisiting past decisions to understand original reasoning
  • During design system evolution to document pattern choices

When NOT to Use

  • The decision is architectural or a technology selection -> use develop-adr (Nygard format)
  • You need stakeholder alignment on the overall solution direction -> use develop-solution-brief
  • You are documenting exploration findings rather than a decision -> use develop-spike-summary
  • The decision is trivially reversible and low-stakes: a rationale document adds ceremony; record the reasoning in the PR or ticket instead

Instructions

When asked to document design rationale, follow these steps:

  1. State the Decision Begin with a clear, one-sentence summary of what design decision was made. This becomes the title and reference point for the document.

  2. Describe the Context Explain the situation that prompted this decision. What problem were you solving? What constraints existed? What user needs informed the direction? Include relevant research findings.

  3. List Options Considered Document at least 2-3 alternatives that were evaluated. For each option, describe what it would look like and its key characteristics. Be fair to all options.avoid strawmen.

  4. Define Evaluation Criteria Specify how options were assessed: usability heuristics, technical feasibility, brand alignment, user research findings, business requirements, or design principles.

Read the full file on GitHub · 78 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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. 9d ago First seen · 78 lines · 45 tokens per session scan A 853395279e4d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

develop-design-rationale is a skill published in the GitHub repository product-on-purpose/pm-skills (652 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 45 tokens to every session and 809 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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