design-doc

design-doc is a skill for Claude Code from taniwhaai/arai. It costs 137 tokens per session (5,023 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A design document that defines a new system's modules, responsibilities, interfaces, data shapes, and data flow before coding begins.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for planning new features, services, or codebases and recording the boundaries and contracts developers must follow.
Why use it?
It gives implementation work a shared structure and helps prevent unnecessary abstractions and conflicting local decisions.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/.

Good fit It is for planning new features, services, or codebases and recording the boundaries and contracts developers must follow.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/taniwhaai/arai/design-doc
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 taniwhaai/arai --skill design-doc
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/taniwhaai/arai

Made for: Claude Code.

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 design-doc

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/taniwhaai/arai/design-doc/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/taniwhaai/arai/design-doc)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/taniwhaai/arai/design-doc"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/taniwhaai/arai/design-doc/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 design-doc

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/taniwhaai/arai/design-doc"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/taniwhaai/arai/design-doc.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 137 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,023 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 $0.00137 $0.05023
Opus 5 $0.00068 $0.02511
Sonnet 5 $0.00027 $0.01005
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00502

Measured 9d ago against content hash 1c4733bdfef5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-doc 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 9d 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.

.claude/skills/design-doc/SKILL.md · 288 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 288 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design Doc

Produce a structural design document that commits to the shape of a system before any code is written. The document is the seed artefact for everything downstream — contract derivation, leaf implementation, and composition all read from it.

Why this skill exists

When code generation begins without an explicit structural commitment, each step optimises locally. A class is added here, a wrapper there, a "just in case" abstraction somewhere else. There is no global view to push back against any individual decision, so the codebase accretes complexity that nobody asked for and nobody can later justify.

A design document forces the global decisions to happen first, in one place, where they can be evaluated against each other. Once it exists, every subsequent generation step has a constraint to honour rather than a blank canvas to sprawl across. The discipline is the value; the document is the artefact that carries it.

This is not a UML diagram and it is not a README. It is the smallest artefact that can fully answer: what modules exist, what is each one responsible for, what does each one expose, and how does data flow between them.

When to produce a design doc

Produce one whenever the work is larger than a single function or single file change. The cost of the document is small; the cost of an unconstrained generation that has to be unwound later is large.

Skip it for: bug fixes scoped to one module, single-file scripts, experimental throwaway code the user has explicitly framed as throwaway, or modifications that fit entirely within an existing module's contract.

The single most important rule

If the prompt under-specifies a behaviour, ask. Do not decide.

The most expensive failure mode of this skill is silently filling in plausible-looking detail that the user never asked for. A prompt like "build me a URL shortener" does not specify retry counts, consistency policies, or the exact shape of given external interfaces — and those are not decisions for you to make. They are decisions for the user. Picking a "reasonable" value for any of them buries a tradeoff in the design that the user never agreed to and that downstream agents will faithfully implement.

Read the full file on GitHub · 288 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files 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. 9d ago First seen · 288 lines · 137 tokens per session scan A 1c4733bdfef5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-doc is a skill published in the GitHub repository taniwhaai/arai (7 stars, last pushed 27d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 137 tokens to every session and 5,023 once invoked, about $0.0007 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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