slice

slice is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from thoughtbot/rails-consultant. It costs 34 tokens per session (2,090 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for breaking a large feature or a vague user story into small pieces that can be delivered independently. It first clarifies who the work is for and what finished means.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define an epic's smaller deliverables or sharpen one feature request into a focused, shippable slice.
Why use it?
It prevents broad or unclear work from expanding into a difficult-to-ship project.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the rails-consultant plugin — 12 skills 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/thoughtbot/rails-consultant/slice
Any agent
npx skills add thoughtbot/rails-consultant --skill slice
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/thoughtbot/rails-consultant

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install rails-consultant, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 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 slice

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thoughtbot/rails-consultant/slice.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/thoughtbot/rails-consultant/slice)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/thoughtbot/rails-consultant/slice"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thoughtbot/rails-consultant/slice.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,090 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 $0.00034 $0.02090
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.01045
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00418
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00209

Measured 4d ago against content hash 4a62888ff567, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

slice 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 4d 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/slice/SKILL.md · 174 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 174 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Phase 1: Understand the Work

If no feature is specified, open with:

"What are you building? Describe the feature or capability — big or small."

Wait for their answer before proceeding.

Once the feature is known, ask three things — conversationally, not as a form:

"Before we slice this, I need to understand it. Three things:

Who is this for — specifically? Not 'users', but which person, in which moment, with which need.

What does done look like? When this ships, what can that person do that they can't do today?

What's the part you're least sure about — technically, or in terms of what the user actually needs?"

Wait for their answers. Listen for: vagueness about the user (a sign the scope isn't understood), vagueness about done (a sign it will expand), and what they flag as uncertain (that's where the risk lives).

If their answers are vague, ask one follow-up before moving on. Do not proceed to slicing on work you don't understand.

Ground it in the codebase — when there is one

Slices invented in the abstract ignore reality. In an existing app, the right cut depends on what's already there: half of it may exist already, the layers it touches may already have the abstractions it needs, and the edge cases worth putting in acceptance criteria are the ones this domain actually has, not the ones you can imagine.

Skip this step entirely when it doesn't apply:

  • The conversation already carries a codebase map. If you arrived here from /feature-dev, its Phase 2 has already done this work — use what it found and move on. Never explore the same ground twice.
  • There's nothing to explore. Greenfield work, a brand-new app, or a feature that touches no existing behavior. Same for a product-shaped conversation where no repo is in play.

Otherwise, match the effort to the feature. For a small change in familiar territory, a few targeted reads inline are enough. For anything spanning layers or touching code you don't know, launch 2–3 general-purpose subagents in parallel (via the Agent tool) — give each the brief in references/slice-explorer.md plus a different angle to cover:

Read the full file on GitHub · 174 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. 4d ago First seen · 174 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 4a62888ff567

Subscribe to this mod's changes

slice is a skill published in the GitHub repository thoughtbot/rails-consultant (23 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 2,090 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.

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