api-design-principles

api-design-principles is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from wshobson/agents. It costs 44 tokens per session (813 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to designing REST and GraphQL APIs, which are ways for software systems to exchange data. It covers resource naming, HTTP actions, schemas, queries, and developer-facing documentation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when creating, reviewing, refactoring, documenting, or migrating REST and GraphQL APIs.
Why use it?
It helps prevent confusing or inconsistent API designs that are difficult for other developers and applications to use or maintain.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Part of the backend-development plugin — 9 skills, 1 command, 5 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it when creating, reviewing, refactoring, documenting, or migrating REST and GraphQL…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/wshobson/agents/api-design-principles
About the project

Agentic Plugin Marketplace is a collection of reusable plugins, agents, skills, commands, and rules for coding-agent tools including Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, OpenCode, Antigravity CLI, and GitHub Copilot. It is for developers assembling agentic workflows across multiple harnesses from shared Markdown sources, and the catalogue entries are examples or subsets of those workflow components.

wshobson/agents · 39,461 stars · on GitHub · sethhobson.com

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 wshobson/agents --skill api-design-principles
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/wshobson/agents

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install backend-development, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 9 skills, 1 command, 5 agents.

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 api-design-principles

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wshobson/agents/api-design-principles.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/wshobson/agents/api-design-principles)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/wshobson/agents/api-design-principles"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wshobson/agents/api-design-principles.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 44 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 813 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 $0.00044 $0.00813
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00407
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00163
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00081

Measured 3d ago against content hash 1f6166c23c0a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

api-design-principles 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (assets/rest-api-template.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

2 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

plugins/backend-development/skills/api-design-principles/SKILL.md · 111 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 111 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

API Design Principles

Master REST and GraphQL API design principles to build intuitive, scalable, and maintainable APIs that delight developers and stand the test of time.

When to Use This Skill

  • Designing new REST or GraphQL APIs
  • Refactoring existing APIs for better usability
  • Establishing API design standards for your team
  • Reviewing API specifications before implementation
  • Migrating between API paradigms (REST to GraphQL, etc.)
  • Creating developer-friendly API documentation
  • Optimizing APIs for specific use cases (mobile, third-party integrations)

Core Concepts

1. RESTful Design Principles

Resource-Oriented Architecture

  • Resources are nouns (users, orders, products), not verbs
  • Use HTTP methods for actions (GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE)
  • URLs represent resource hierarchies
  • Consistent naming conventions

HTTP Methods Semantics:

  • GET: Retrieve resources (idempotent, safe)
  • POST: Create new resources
  • PUT: Replace entire resource (idempotent)
  • PATCH: Partial resource updates
  • DELETE: Remove resources (idempotent)

2. GraphQL Design Principles

Schema-First Development

  • Types define your domain model
  • Queries for reading data
  • Mutations for modifying data
  • Subscriptions for real-time updates

Query Structure:

  • Clients request exactly what they need
  • Single endpoint, multiple operations
  • Strongly typed schema
  • Introspection built-in

3. API Versioning Strategies

URL Versioning:

/api/v1/users
/api/v2/users

Header Versioning:

Accept: application/vnd.api+json; version=1

Query Parameter Versioning:

/api/users?version=1

Detailed patterns and worked examples

Detailed pattern documentation lives in references/details.md. Read that file when the navigation tier above is insufficient.

Best Practices

REST APIs

  1. Consistent Naming: Use plural nouns for collections (/users, not /user)
  2. Stateless: Each request contains all necessary information
  3. Use HTTP Status Codes Correctly: 2xx success, 4xx client errors, 5xx server errors
  4. Version Your API: Plan for breaking changes from day one
  5. Pagination: Always paginate large collections
  6. Rate Limiting: Protect your API with rate limits
  7. Documentation: Use OpenAPI/Swagger for interactive docs

Read the full file on GitHub · 111 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 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. 3d ago First seen · 111 lines · 44 tokens per session scan A 1f6166c23c0a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

api-design-principles is a skill published in the GitHub repository wshobson/agents (39,461 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 44 tokens to every session and 813 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 2026-09-03.

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