change-impact-analysis

change-impact-analysis is a skill for Claude Code from sethdford/claude-skills. It costs 32 tokens per session (604 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for examining what could be affected by a major change to a software system. It follows direct changes, dependent systems, risks, and recovery steps.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to trace callers and dependent services, assess effects on behavior, performance, data, or availability, and prepare ways to reduce risk and roll back the change.
Why use it?
It helps reveal hidden dependencies and possible failures before an architectural change is released.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the architecture-governance plugin — 7 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to trace callers and dependent services, assess effects on behavior, performance, data, or availability, and prepare ways to reduce risk and roll back the change.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/sethdford/claude-skills/change-impact-analysis
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 sethdford/claude-skills --skill change-impact-analysis
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sethdford/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install architecture-governance, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills.

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 change-impact-analysis

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/change-impact-analysis/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/change-impact-analysis)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/change-impact-analysis"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/change-impact-analysis/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 change-impact-analysis

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/change-impact-analysis"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/change-impact-analysis.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 32 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 604 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 $0.00032 $0.00604
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00302
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00121
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00060

Measured 11d ago against content hash 74fd8c95aff0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

change-impact-analysis 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.

architect/architecture-governance/skills/change-impact-analysis/SKILL.md · 47 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 47 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Change Impact Analysis

Systematically analyze impacts of architectural changes to predict risk and plan safe rollout.

Context

You are analyzing impact of a major change. Trace affected systems, identify risks, plan mitigation. Read current dependency graph, deployment practices, system health metrics.

Domain Context

Based on change management and impact analysis frameworks:

  • Direct Impact: System directly modified. Code changes, performance changes, behavior changes.
  • Indirect Impact: Dependent systems affected. Database schema change affects clients. Service API change affects all callers. Message format change affects consumers.
  • Risk Assessment: What could go wrong? Cascading failures? Data loss? Performance regression? Unavailability of critical path?
  • Rollback Plan: If change goes wrong, can you revert quickly? What data consistency issues might occur?

Instructions

  1. Trace Dependencies: What systems depend on the component you're changing? Use dependency graph tools (source analysis, API scanning). Interview teams.

  2. Assess Direct Impact: For the component itself, what's changing? Behavior? Performance? Data model? How does change affect invariants, contracts, SLAs?

  3. Assess Indirect Impact: For each dependent system, how does change affect it? Can they continue working with new interface? Will they need code changes? Testing?

  4. Calculate Risk Score: How many systems affected? (x10 multiplier per additional system). How critical are those systems? (x5 for customer-facing, x2 for internal). Estimate blast radius.

  5. Plan Mitigation: For high-risk changes, plan phased rollout (10% users, 50%, 100%). Parallel run (old and new simultaneously). Comprehensive testing and monitoring. Runbook for quick rollback.

Anti-Patterns

  • Change Without Impact Analysis: Architect makes change unilaterally. Result: breaks production, cascading failures. Guard: Mandatory impact analysis before major changes; design review.
  • Underestimating Blast Radius: Assume only 1-2 systems affected. Result: surprises. Guard: Systematic dependency tracing; interview teams; over-estimate.
  • No Rollback Plan: Assume change succeeds. Result: stuck if it fails. Guard: Practice rollbacks; measure rollback time; have detailed procedure.
  • Ignoring Monitoring: Make change, wait for problems to surface. Result: incidents. Guard: Comprehensive monitoring; metrics for correctness, performance, errors; alert on anomalies.

Read the full file on GitHub · 47 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 · 47 lines · 32 tokens per session scan A 74fd8c95aff0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

change-impact-analysis is a skill published in the GitHub repository sethdford/claude-skills (40 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 32 tokens to every session and 604 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.

Related

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