shipkit-adr

A tool for recording one architecture decision in two files: a full archive and a short index. An architecture decision records an important choice about how a system is built.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to record new decisions, replace earlier decisions, or amend an existing decision in the project's architecture records.
Why use it?
It preserves the reasoning behind a decision while keeping the short version small enough to load in every coding session.

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/stefan-stepzero/shipkit/shipkit-adr
Any agent
npx skills add stefan-stepzero/shipkit --skill shipkit-adr
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/stefan-stepzero/shipkit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 68 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,638 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 $0.00068 $0.01638
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00819
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00328
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00164

Measured yesterday against content hash a894dc325976, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

shipkit-adr 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 yesterday.

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.

install/skills/shipkit-adr/SKILL.md · 132 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 132 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

shipkit-adr - Land a Decision Atomically

Purpose: Record one architecture decision the moment it's made — as a single atomic transaction across both decision files, with a hard length cap on what enters the always-loaded lean index.

Why this exists: architecture.json is @-imported into CLAUDE.md, so every byte of it loads into every session. The moment a decision gets recorded is exactly when a long rationale is freshest and most tempting to paste in. This skill enforces the lean/archive split at that moment: full reasoning is preserved (archive), context stays cheap (lean).

Output: One entry appended to .shipkit/architecture-archive.json (full) + the capped projection in .shipkit/architecture.json (lean).


When to Invoke

User triggers:

  • "Record this decision" / "log an ADR"
  • "We decided X" (after a decision is settled in conversation)
  • "ADR-NNN is superseded by this" / "that replaces the earlier decision"
  • "Amend ADR-NNN"

Agent triggers: Any skill or agent that has just made an architecture-level decision mid-work lands it here instead of hand-editing architecture.json.


Prerequisites

None. If either decision file is missing, this skill initializes it (schemas below). The canonical convention both files follow is shipkit-engineering-definition/references/architecture-log-schema.md — read it for edge cases; the operative rules are inlined here.


Hard Caps (non-negotiable)

What enters the lean file is capped. Full text always survives in the archive — leaning relocates information, it never loses it.

Lean field Cap
decision one line, ≤ 120 chars
rationale one line, ≤ 160 chars
superseded entry stub only: { id, status, supersededBy, decision } — nothing else

If the user's phrasing exceeds a cap, compress it for the lean file and put the full text in the archive entry. Never widen the cap; never put alternatives in the lean file.


Process

Step 1: Capture the decision

Read the full file on GitHub · 132 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. yesterday First seen · 132 lines · 68 tokens per session scan A a894dc325976

Subscribe to this mod's changes

shipkit-adr is a skill published in the GitHub repository stefan-stepzero/shipkit (1 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 1,638 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.