api-design

A guide for designing web and service APIs, the agreed rules that software uses to exchange data. It covers REST and gRPC interfaces, request and response formats, versioning, error codes, compatibility, rate limits, and OpenAPI documentation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define API routes and data contracts, choose versioning, document endpoints, set HTTP errors and rate limits, and plan backward-compatible changes.
Why use it?
It helps keep endpoints predictable and prevents changes from unexpectedly breaking existing clients.

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/saitarrun/devforge-ai/api-design
Any agent
npx skills add saitarrun/Devforge-ai --skill api-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/saitarrun/Devforge-ai

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 48 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 675 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 $0.00048 $0.00675
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00338
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00135
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00068

Measured 2d ago against content hash eb0f1879990c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

api-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 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.

skills/api-design/SKILL.md · 114 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 114 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill: API Design

Design APIs as contracts. Versions matter. Backward compatibility is non-negotiable.

REST Principles

  • Noun-based URLs: /users not /getUsers
  • HTTP methods: GET (read), POST (create), PUT (update), DELETE (remove)
  • Status codes: 200 (OK), 201 (created), 400 (bad request), 401 (auth), 404 (not found), 500 (error)
  • Consistency: Same patterns across all endpoints

Versioning Strategy

URL path (explicit, clear):

GET /api/v1/users   # v1 API
GET /api/v2/users   # v2 API (breaking change)

Header (less visible, prefer path):

GET /api/users
Header: API-Version: 2

Breaking Changes = Major Version

v1.0 → v2.0: User response format changed
v1.1 → v1.2: New optional field added (backward-compatible)
v1.0 → v1.1: Bug fix (patch)

API Contract (OpenAPI/Swagger)

paths:
  /users/{id}:
    get:
      summary: Get user
      parameters:
        - name: id
          in: path
          required: true
          schema: { type: string }
      responses:
        '200':
          description: User found
          content:
            application/json:
              schema:
                $ref: '#/components/schemas/User'
        '404':
          description: Not found

Error Responses

{
  "error": "not_found",
  "message": "User not found",
  "code": 404,
  "details": {
    "resource": "user",
    "id": "user-123"
  }
}

Rate Limiting

Header: X-RateLimit-Limit: 1000
Header: X-RateLimit-Remaining: 999
Header: X-RateLimit-Reset: 1640000000

Pagination

GET /users?page=2&page_size=10

Response:
{
  "items": [...],
  "total": 245,
  "page": 2,
  "page_size": 10,
  "has_next": true
}

Deprecation Plan

1. Announce: Email, docs, API response header
2. Timeline: 6 months before removal
3. Header: X-API-Warn: "endpoint deprecated, use /v2/..."
4. Support: v1 and v2 endpoints run in parallel
5. Remove: After timeline expires

Status: Ready for API design
Best for: API contracts, versioning, error handling

Read the full file on GitHub · 114 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. 2d ago First seen · 114 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A eb0f1879990c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

api-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository saitarrun/Devforge-ai (5 stars, last pushed 19d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 675 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 2026-08-31.

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