Incremental Implementation

Incremental Implementation is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills. It costs 34 tokens per session (3,654 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An implementation approach that breaks a feature into small, independently usable parts. Each part includes the necessary layers, such as the API, application logic, storage, and monitoring.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan feature work, split design documents into tasks, or reduce an oversized change or pull request. It is also suited to changes that need safe rollback.
Why use it?
It avoids large changes that are difficult to test, deploy, or undo. The application stays in a working state as development progresses.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the build-like-amazon plugin — 28 skills, 14 commands, 10 agents shipped together

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/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/incremental-implementation
Any agent
npx skills add robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills --skill incremental-implementation
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install build-like-amazon, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 28 skills, 14 commands, 10 agents.

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 Incremental Implementation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/incremental-implementation.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/incremental-implementation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/incremental-implementation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/incremental-implementation.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,654 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 $0.00034 $0.03654
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.01827
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00731
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00365

Measured 5d ago against content hash 80b047926efd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Incremental Implementation 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 5d 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/incremental-implementation/SKILL.md · 233 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 233 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Overview

Incremental implementation means decomposing any feature into the thinnest possible vertical slices—each of which is independently deployable, testable, and rollback-safe. Every slice passes through the full stack (API → logic → storage → observability) rather than building horizontal layers that only work when all layers are combined.

At Amazon, this is not optional. A team that attempts a big-bang release—weeks of uncommitted code merged at once—will face pipeline rejection, delayed launches, and operational incidents. The one-slice-at-a-time principle ensures that at any point in time, main is deployable and the system is in a known-good state.

When to Use

  • Starting implementation of any feature approved through design review
  • Breaking down a design document into implementation tasks
  • Planning sprint work or developer assignments
  • Any time a change would touch more than ~200 lines of production code
  • When you notice a PR has grown beyond a single logical change

Amazon Context

Amazon deploys million times per year across its services. This velocity is only possible because each deployment is small, reversible, and independent. The culture of "one commit per slice" emerged from painful lessons: large merges cause cascading failures, extended debugging sessions, and blocked pipelines.

Amazon's deployment system enforces bake times between stages. If your deployment contains 15 unrelated changes and one fails, all 15 roll back. This economic reality makes small, focused deployments the only rational strategy.

Feature flags let teams deploy code to production without exposing it to customers. This decouples deployment from release, allowing code to bake safely while business stakeholders decide when to activate.

The Process

1. Slice Identification

Given a design document, decompose the feature into slices using these criteria:

Criteria Good Slice Bad Slice
Vertical completeness Touches API → logic → storage → test Only adds a database table
Independent value Works even if later slices are never built Requires slice 3 and 5 to function
Size 50-200 lines of production code 1000+ lines
Reviewability One reviewer can understand in 30 min Requires 2-hour review meeting
Rollback safety Can be reverted without data migration Creates irreversible schema changes

Read the full file on GitHub · 233 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. 5d ago First seen · 233 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 80b047926efd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Incremental Implementation is a skill published in the GitHub repository robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills (14 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 3,654 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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