Design Review

Design Review is a skill for Claude Code from robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills. It costs 40 tokens per session (2,435 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A pre-build check of a technical design for clarity, completeness, simplicity, safety, and operational readiness.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before building services, APIs, shared libraries, infrastructure, data-model changes, or systems involving dependencies, security boundaries, or customer data.
Why use it?
It finds design problems while they are still easy to fix in a document, before they become costly code or production failures.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the build-like-amazon plugin — 28 skills, 14 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it before building services, APIs, shared libraries, infrastructure, data-model changes, or systems involving dependencies, security boundaries, or customer data.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/design-review
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 robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills --skill design-review
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install build-like-amazon, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 28 skills, 14 commands.

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 Review

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/design-review/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/design-review)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/design-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/design-review/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 Review

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/design-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/design-review.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 40 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,435 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.
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 $0.00040 $0.02435
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.01218
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00487
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00244

Measured 11d ago against content hash d35705328953, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Design Review 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 11d 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-review/SKILL.md · 216 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 216 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design Review

Overview

Design Review is a quality gate before spec-driven-implementation and /build. Its purpose is to catch design flaws while they are still cheap to fix in a document instead of expensive to fix in code or production.

This is not a meeting format, SLA, or panel process. For an agent, the job is straightforward: evaluate whether the design is clear, complete, simple, operable, and safe enough to become executable specs. If the design does not meet the bar, block progression and explain exactly what must change.

When to Use

  • Before creating implementation specs from a design document
  • Before implementing a new service, major component, public API, shared library, infrastructure change, or data model change
  • When the design introduces new external dependencies, queues, caches, databases, third-party APIs, or cross-service calls
  • When the design changes security boundaries, access models, customer data handling, or operational blast radius
  • When a decision is a one-way door or would be expensive to reverse after implementation

Amazon Context

Amazon-style design review raises the bar by forcing written reasoning before implementation. The reviewer evaluates the design on behalf of the customer and the long-term operators of the system, not on behalf of delivery pressure.

A strong review does not try to prove the author wrong. It makes the design better by surfacing missing assumptions, weak trade-offs, hidden failure modes, operational gaps, and unnecessary complexity.

The Process

Before reviewing, load agents/design-bar-raiser.md and apply that persona's review lens. If the design contains a one-way door decision, also load agents/principal-engineer.md and apply that persona to the irreversible decision, blast-radius, and long-term architecture trade-off review.

1. Context Assessment

Before reviewing, classify the design:

  • Is this a one-way door? Public API, data migration, security model, data deletion, service split/merge, or irreversible infrastructure change.
  • Does it introduce or change external dependencies? Services, databases, caches, queues, config systems, or third-party APIs.
  • Does it handle customer, Confidential, or Restricted data?
  • Does it affect other teams, shared infrastructure, or public consumers?
  • Does it add operational burden, new alarms, new runbooks, or new on-call failure modes?

Read the full file on GitHub · 216 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. 11d ago First seen · 216 lines · 40 tokens per session scan A d35705328953

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Design Review is a skill published in the GitHub repository robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills (15 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 40 tokens to every session and 2,435 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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