application-spec

A specification-writing process that records everything a running application does from an outside user's point of view.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to document inputs, outputs, configuration, startup and shutdown, errors, interactions, and other observable behavior.
Why use it?
It gives another team enough precise information to rebuild the application without access to its internal 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/promptctl/laws/application-spec
Any agent
npx skills add promptctl/laws --skill application-spec
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/promptctl/laws

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 168 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 399 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 $0.00168 $0.00399
Opus 5 $0.00084 $0.00199
Sonnet 5 $0.00034 $0.00080
Haiku 4.5 $0.00017 $0.00040

Measured 2d ago against content hash 503f90ce8fd6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

application-spec 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.

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/laws/skills/application-spec/SKILL.md · 26 lines

What it actually says

Producing this artifact

The craft for this medium lives in references/craft.md, relative to this skill's base directory.

  1. Read references/craft.md before touching the target.
  2. Fix these before you write:
    • the complete requirements, in the requester's own words
    • the target: the repo path, or how to reach the application (command, URL, credentials) - every evidence channel available to you
    • the exact output path for the spec (default: an appspec/ directory at the target root)
    • the acceptance criterion: an independent team holding only the spec could rebuild the application, and no sentence in the spec states a fact an outside observer of the running application could not confirm
  3. Write the spec against the craft.
  4. Read back the spec files you produced - the files themselves, not your memory of writing them - and spot-check both directions: sample surfaces for completeness, sample sentences for leaked internals. If it misses, revise until it holds.
Files

What ships with it

1 file 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 · 26 lines · 168 tokens per session scan A 503f90ce8fd6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

application-spec is a skill published in the GitHub repository promptctl/laws (4 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 168 tokens to every session and 399 once invoked, about $0.0008 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 2026-08-31.

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