user-stories-guide

user-stories-guide is a skill for Claude Code from xonovex/platform. It costs 132 tokens per session (980 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for writing and improving user stories: short descriptions of user needs used to plan software work. It covers acceptance criteria, which describe how to tell when a story is complete.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write, review, split, and refine backlog items, including “As a / I want / so that” stories. It also helps create acceptance criteria and split work vertically across the system.
Why use it?
It helps turn vague or oversized work items into small, testable pieces that deliver usable value. It also provides checks for whether a story is clear, valuable, and feasible.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the xonovex-skill-user-stories plugin — 1 skill shipped together

Good fit Use it to write, review, split, and refine backlog items, including “As a / I want / so that” stories. It also helps create acceptance criteria and split work vertically across the system.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/xonovex/platform/user-stories-guide
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 xonovex/platform --skill user-stories-guide
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/xonovex/platform

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install xonovex-skill-user-stories, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

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 user-stories-guide

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xonovex/platform/user-stories-guide/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/xonovex/platform/user-stories-guide)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/xonovex/platform/user-stories-guide"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xonovex/platform/user-stories-guide/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 user-stories-guide

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/xonovex/platform/user-stories-guide"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xonovex/platform/user-stories-guide.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 132 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 980 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 $0.00132 $0.00980
Opus 5.5 $0.00053 $0.00392
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00196
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00098

Measured 15d ago against content hash e5f7e024fbc2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-23, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

user-stories-guide 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 15d 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.

packages/skill/skill-user-stories/user-stories-guide/SKILL.md · 56 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 56 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

User Stories

A user story is a placeholder for a conversation about user value, not a specification. Write it small, talk it through, confirm it with acceptance criteria, and slice it vertically so every story ships usable value end to end.

Essentials

Gotchas

  • A walking skeleton is production code with tests linking the main components end to end, not a throwaway prototype or a research spike.
  • Never split horizontally ("build the DB", "build the API", "build the UI"); those are tasks/components. Every story is a thin vertical slice.
  • A Spike yields knowledge, not shippable value, so it is a last-resort move, not itself a vertically-sliced story.
  • The template is a conversation starter, not a mandatory format, no method prescribes a fixed story format.
  • Acceptance criteria can later be written as Given-When-Then for automation. That notation is owned by bdd-guide.
  • Backlog refinement is an ongoing activity, not a fixed weekly "grooming meeting"; sizing is the Developers' responsibility.

Read the full file on GitHub · 56 lines

Files

What ships with it

9 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. 15d ago First seen · 56 lines · 132 tokens per session scan A e5f7e024fbc2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

user-stories-guide is a skill published in the GitHub repository xonovex/platform (6 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 132 tokens to every session and 980 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-09-08.