designing-work

designing-work is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from wazimmerman/zimster. It costs 19 tokens per session (1,153 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning guide for turning an unclear or high-impact software request into a short agreement about scope, design, and acceptance criteria.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before substantial feature work, migrations, security-sensitive changes, or requests where different design choices would lead to different implementations.
Why use it?
It prevents developers from making important architectural or behavior decisions before understanding the existing code, constraints, and desired result.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: shipped in a Claude Code plugin, but also agents/openai.yaml present.

Part of the zimster plugin — 12 skills, 1 command, 4 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it before substantial feature work, migrations, security-sensitive changes, or requests where different design choices would lead to different implementations.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/wazimmerman/zimster/designing-work
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 wazimmerman/zimster --skill designing-work
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/wazimmerman/zimster

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install zimster, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 skills, 1 command, 4 agents, 1 hook.

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 designing-work

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wazimmerman/zimster/designing-work/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/wazimmerman/zimster/designing-work)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/wazimmerman/zimster/designing-work"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wazimmerman/zimster/designing-work/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 designing-work

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/wazimmerman/zimster/designing-work"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wazimmerman/zimster/designing-work.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 19 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,153 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 $0.00019 $0.01153
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00576
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00231
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00115

Measured 9d ago against content hash e2817a8ca05d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

designing-work 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.

plugins/zimster/skills/designing-work/SKILL.md · 159 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 159 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Designing Work

Use this skill when choices about scope, architecture, behavior, or acceptance would materially change the implementation. Skip it for exact low-risk edits.

Choose design depth from the work itself:

  • exact, low-risk, well-defined work proceeds without design ceremony;
  • material ambiguity or a consequential choice gets compact design;
  • a large product, major architecture or UX decision, security or migration boundary, public contract, or expensive commitment gets deeper collaborative design;
  • an oversized multi-system request is decomposed before one bounded workstream receives deeper design.

Do not turn this hierarchy into a universal brainstorming gate. Do not require one question per turn, a committed specification for routine work, or agents whose only purpose is brainstorming.

1. Inspect before asking

Read the repository instructions, relevant code, tests, architecture notes, and recent changes. Prefer answering questions from the project over asking the user to repeat information already present.

Identify:

  • the current behavior and authoritative interfaces;
  • the requested outcome;
  • constraints and explicit exclusions;
  • external systems, hardware, migrations, concurrency, or security risks;
  • evidence that can and cannot be produced in the current environment.

Decompose only oversized requests

After inspection, decide whether the request is one complex but coherent system or multiple substantial, loosely coupled systems with independently meaningful workstreams. A request touching many files does not by itself require decomposition, and a well-scoped request should proceed normally.

When one plan would be too broad to stay coherent:

  1. identify logical subprojects or bounded workstreams;
  2. state their dependencies and recommended order;
  3. establish enough shared architecture and constraints to prevent incompatible subprojects;
  4. preserve the overall mission for later workstreams;
  5. select the first useful bounded piece for deeper design.

Read the full file on GitHub · 159 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. 9d ago First seen · 159 lines · 19 tokens per session scan A e2817a8ca05d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

designing-work is a skill published in the GitHub repository wazimmerman/zimster (2 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 19 tokens to every session and 1,153 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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