shape

A planning guide for designing a feature's user experience and interface before writing code. It uses a structured conversation to produce a design brief.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when starting a new screen, feature, or interface and you need decisions about users, layout, interactions, and visual direction.
Why use it?
It helps clarify the user's goal, constraints, and design direction before implementation begins, reducing guesswork and rework.

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/resciencelab/tryskills/shape
Any agent
npx skills add ReScienceLab/TrySkills --skill shape
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ReScienceLab/TrySkills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 49 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,104 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00049 $0.01104
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00552
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00221
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00110

Measured yesterday against content hash 20ac5e5abf2f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

shape 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 yesterday.

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.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to shape — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.agents/skills/shape/SKILL.md · 96 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 96 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

MANDATORY PREPARATION

Invoke /impeccable, which contains design principles, anti-patterns, and the Context Gathering Protocol. Follow the protocol before proceeding. If no design context exists yet, you MUST run /impeccable teach first.


Shape the UX and UI for a feature before any code is written. This skill produces a design brief: a structured artifact that guides implementation through discovery, not guesswork.

Scope: Design planning only. This skill does NOT write code. It produces the thinking that makes code good.

Output: A design brief that can be handed off to /impeccable craft, /impeccable, or any other implementation skill.

Philosophy

Most AI-generated UIs fail not because of bad code, but because of skipped thinking. They jump to "here's a card grid" without asking "what is the user trying to accomplish?" This skill inverts that: understand deeply first, so implementation is precise.

Phase 1: Discovery Interview

Do NOT write any code or make any design decisions during this phase. Your only job is to understand the feature deeply enough to make excellent design decisions later.

Ask these questions in conversation, adapting based on answers. Don't dump them all at once; have a natural dialogue. ask the user directly to clarify what you cannot infer.

Purpose & Context

  • What is this feature for? What problem does it solve?
  • Who specifically will use it? (Not "users"; be specific: role, context, frequency)
  • What does success look like? How will you know this feature is working?
  • What's the user's state of mind when they reach this feature? (Rushed? Exploring? Anxious? Focused?)

Content & Data

  • What content or data does this feature display or collect?
  • What are the realistic ranges? (Minimum, typical, maximum, e.g., 0 items, 5 items, 500 items)
  • What are the edge cases? (Empty state, error state, first-time use, power user)
  • Is any content dynamic? What changes and how often?

Design Goals

  • What's the single most important thing a user should do or understand here?
  • What should this feel like? (Fast/efficient? Calm/trustworthy? Fun/playful? Premium/refined?)
  • Are there existing patterns in the product this should be consistent with?
  • Are there specific examples (inside or outside the product) that capture what you're going for?

Read the full file on GitHub · 96 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. yesterday First seen · 96 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A 20ac5e5abf2f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

shape is a skill published in the GitHub repository ReScienceLab/TrySkills (2 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 1,104 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to shape, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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