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.
npx agentmods add skills/pyros-projects/limitless/surface-first-developmentnpx skills add pyros-projects/limitless --skill surface-first-developmentgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pyros-projects/limitlessWhat 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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00128 | $0.04462 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00064 | $0.02231 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00026 | $0.00892 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00013 | $0.00446 |
Grade A, and why
surface-first-development 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 377 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Surface-First Development
Reference
If anything in this skill feels unclear, underspecified, or in tension with a real project situation, stop and read references/whitepaper-v0.6.md before improvising. Treat that whitepaper as the authoritative reference for the methodology.
If this SKILL.md and the whitepaper ever feel misaligned, follow the whitepaper and then update the skill so the drift is removed.
Triggers
- User says "let's build", "I want an app/tool/CLI/API that...", "I have an idea for..."
- User describes a product, feature, or tool without specifying architecture or internals
- User says "surface first", "click dummy", "show me what it would look like", "prototype this"
- User says "SFD", "surface-first"
- User wants to start a new project or feature and hasn't locked in a tech approach yet
- User asks "how should this work?" or "what would the UX be?" or "what would the workflow look like?"
Purpose
You are following the Surface-First Development methodology. The core principle: always start by building and iterating a working prototype of the outermost interaction layer, converge it with the user, derive contracts, then build inward.
Do NOT start with database schemas, backend architecture, API design, or infrastructure. Start with what the user will actually see, touch, type, or call.
Operating Stance
- Move from concrete artifact to critique, not from abstract discussion to specification.
- Make reasonable product decisions without asking the user to design the system for you.
- Prefer a fast, interactive prototype over a polished explanation of a prototype.
- Treat the user as the evaluator and steering function; your job is to generate proposals they can react to.
- Keep internals provisional until the surface is accepted.
The Propose-Choose-Proceed Rule
This is the governing interaction pattern for the entire SFD process. Every decision point — from research directions to surface proposals to contract shapes to slice ordering — follows this loop:
What ships with it
2 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.
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.
- 2d ago First seen · 377 lines · 128 tokens per session scan A 6c4988e69c6f
surface-first-development is a skill published in the GitHub repository pyros-projects/limitless (9 stars, last pushed 20d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 128 tokens to every session and 4,462 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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