swe-shape

swe-shape is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from SNIKO/agent-skills. It costs 38 tokens per session (1,894 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for turning a software-change idea into a concise brief grounded in the repository. The brief explains why the change is worth building, what outcome it should produce, and how success will be recognised.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before non-trivial features, fixes, refactors, or migrations to inspect the repository and research notes and write a brief for the next specification stage.
Why use it?
It clarifies value, scope, and feasibility before detailed design or implementation begins.

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/sniko/agent-skills/swe-shape
Any agent
npx skills add SNIKO/agent-skills --skill swe-shape
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/SNIKO/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 swe-shape

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sniko/agent-skills/swe-shape.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sniko/agent-skills/swe-shape)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sniko/agent-skills/swe-shape"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sniko/agent-skills/swe-shape.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 38 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,894 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 $0.00038 $0.01894
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.00947
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00379
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00189

Measured 5d ago against content hash d6c32bf513bd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

swe-shape 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/swe-shape/SKILL.md · 118 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 118 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Pipeline

swe-shapeswe-spec → [swe-plan] → [swe-worktree] → swe-executeswe-review, with swe-research available at any point.

Each stage runs in its own session: the user invokes one skill, reviews the artifact, clears the context, then invokes the next with the artifacts as input. Assume no memory of other stages beyond the files named below.

  • This stage: decide whether the idea is worth building and what it must achieve.
  • Reads: the user's idea, the repository, and the shared research corpus.
  • Writes: brief.md.
  • Next: the user runs swe-spec to decide what actually changes.

Purpose

Determine whether a proposed change is worth building, what outcome it must produce, and whether it is feasible in this repository. Produce a brief — not a design, at any level of detail.

Inputs

CHANGE_DIR: .swe/YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>/ — create it for this change unless the conversation already names one. BRIEF_FILE: {CHANGE_DIR}/brief.md, written from brief.template.md. RESEARCH_DIR: .swe/research/ — shared across all changes, indexed by INDEX.md.

What Belongs in a Brief

A brief answers why, and how will we know it worked. It never says how the change is built.

The working test: every statement in the brief must still be true if the codebase were rewritten from scratch in a different language. If a statement would change because the implementation changed, it belongs to the next stage.

  • "p95 under 300ms" belongs. "Response cached in Redis with a 60s TTL" does not.
  • "Must not break the v1 API contract" belongs. "The v1 adapter maps foo to bar" does not.
  • "Must reuse the existing job queue" does not — that is a solution choice. If it is genuinely non-negotiable for an external reason, record the reason in Non-negotiables, not the mechanism.

Engineering Stance

You and the user are peers shaping this idea together; neither outranks the other, and being asked to put something in the brief is not authorization to record it unexamined.

Read the full file on GitHub · 118 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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 · 118 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A d6c32bf513bd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

swe-shape is a skill published in the GitHub repository SNIKO/agent-skills (2 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 1,894 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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