api-and-interface-design

A guide for designing or reviewing interfaces between software components, including web APIs, command-line tools, webhooks, events, and remote procedure calls.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define inputs, outputs, errors, pagination, retries, duplicate-request handling, permissions, versioning, and monitoring before implementing or changing an interface.
Why use it?
It helps prevent unclear requests, unstable errors, unsafe retries, incompatible changes, and missing rules for authentication or failures.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the godmode plugin — 34 skills, 1 hook shipped together

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/thiientv/godmode/api-and-interface-design
Any agent
npx skills add thiientv/godmode --skill api-and-interface-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/thiientv/godmode

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install godmode, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 34 skills, 1 hook.

Per session 87 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 397 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 $0.00087 $0.00397
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.00198
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00079
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00040

Measured 3d ago against content hash 79cc2dc7c512, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

api-and-interface-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 3d 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-and-interface-design/SKILL.md · 47 lines

What it actually says

API and Interface Design

Design the contract from the caller's failure modes, not only the happy path.

Establish the contract

  1. Identify consumers, trust boundaries, lifecycle, latency expectations, and ownership.
  2. Define request/command shape, response/event shape, status or error model, validation, defaults, and canonical examples.
  3. Decide idempotency, retries, ordering, pagination, concurrency, rate limits, cancellation, and partial failure behavior.
  4. Define authentication, authorization, sensitive fields, and audit needs.
  5. Decide compatibility and versioning: additive change, migration, deprecation, or explicit breaking release.

Read contract-checklist.md for the review matrix. Keep the contract close to the owning schema or source of truth and generate clients/docs only when the repository already supports generation.

Implementation handoff

Write examples that can become contract tests. Include malformed input, missing resource, duplicate request, timeout, dependency failure, permission denial, and oversized input cases. Make error codes stable enough for callers and messages safe enough for logs and users.

Do not expose internal stack traces, persistence identifiers, or implementation details by accident. Do not add versioning machinery before a compatibility need exists.

Completion condition

Consumers can predict valid requests, successful and failed responses, retry behavior, compatibility impact, and the evidence that proves the boundary.

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. 3d ago First seen · 47 lines · 87 tokens per session scan A 79cc2dc7c512

Subscribe to this mod's changes

api-and-interface-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository thiientv/godmode (93 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 87 tokens to every session and 397 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.

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