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/rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineer/solution-designnpx skills add rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineer --skill solution-designgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineerWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineer/solution-design)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineer/solution-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineer/solution-design.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00103 | $0.01822 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00051 | $0.00911 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00021 | $0.00364 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00182 |
Grade A, and why
solution-design 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 4d 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 — 164 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Solution design
Choosing an approach, and recording why.
Why this exists
Two failure modes, and an FDE is exposed to both.
The first is the single-option design: the first workable approach becomes the approach, because it works and time is short. Nobody compared it to anything, so nobody knows if it was good — including you, when it turns out badly in month three.
The second is the imported default. An FDE arrives with patterns that worked elsewhere and applies them without checking whether the constraints that made them right still hold. This is the specific way outside expertise goes wrong, and the team can see it happening even when you can't.
The defence for both is the same: generate real alternatives, evaluate against this organization's constraints, and write down why you rejected the others. That last part matters most, because the rejected options are what a future engineer needs — otherwise they'll propose one of them in a year, and nobody will remember why it doesn't work.
When this applies
- More than one plausible approach
- A design decision arrived pre-made in the requirements and deserves checking
- Before committing to an architecture, a contract, or a dependency
- The change is expensive to reverse
When it doesn't
- One obvious implementation — don't manufacture alternatives for ceremony
- Reversible, local changes
- The decision has genuinely already been made by someone with the authority to make it. Record it as a constraint and move on.
Prerequisites
.fde/03-requirements.md— what must be true.fde/04-feasibility.md— what the code can actually support, and the alternatives it spotted.fde/03b-nfrs.mdif it exists,.fde/02b-ownership.mdfor who must agree
Procedure
1. State the decision precisely
One sentence, in the form of a question. "How should refund currency be resolved?" not "Refund currency design."
If you can't state it as a single question, you have several decisions bundled together. Split them — bundled decisions get approved or rejected as a unit, which means the good parts fail with the bad.
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.
- 4d ago First seen · 164 lines · 103 tokens per session scan A 233f9a71cf02
solution-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository rpraharaj/forward-deployed-engineer (5 stars, last pushed 17d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 103 tokens to every session and 1,822 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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