spec-first-ai-feature

spec-first-ai-feature is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from zorost/AI-Engineering-Lab. It costs 47 tokens per session (1,064 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A one-page planning method for AI features, agents, and pipelines that defines the user, desired results, measurements, and limits before implementation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when starting an AI feature or when development has drifted without a written target.
Why use it?
It prevents teams from coding or writing prompts without agreeing on what success means.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it when starting an AI feature or when development has drifted without a written target.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/zorost/ai-engineering-lab/spec-first-ai-feature
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 zorost/AI-Engineering-Lab --skill spec-first-ai-feature
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/zorost/AI-Engineering-Lab

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 spec-first-ai-feature

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zorost/ai-engineering-lab/spec-first-ai-feature/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/zorost/ai-engineering-lab/spec-first-ai-feature)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zorost/ai-engineering-lab/spec-first-ai-feature"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zorost/ai-engineering-lab/spec-first-ai-feature/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 spec-first-ai-feature

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zorost/ai-engineering-lab/spec-first-ai-feature"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zorost/ai-engineering-lab/spec-first-ai-feature.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 47 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,064 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00047 $0.01064
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00532
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00213
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00106

Measured 10d ago against content hash 0249bf135967, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

spec-first-ai-feature 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 10d 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.

reference/skills/agent-skills/spec-first-ai-feature/SKILL.md · 95 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 95 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Spec-First AI Feature

1 · Purpose

Force the four decisions that make an AI feature buildable, who it serves, what "correct" means, how it is measured, and what tradeoffs are refused, onto one page before any implementation begins.

2 · When to use

  • Starting any AI feature: extraction, RAG bot, agent, fine-tune, integration.
  • When a build has drifted for more than a session without a written target.

Do not use for exploratory notebooks whose entire purpose is learning a library. Label those "spike" and timebox them instead.

3 · Inputs

  • The feature request, verbatim.
  • Access to the requester (or their proxy) for the two questions in step 3.
  • One sample of real input data, if any exists.

4 · Procedure

  1. Create SPEC.md in the project root. Use the five headings below, no others.
  2. User & job. Write who uses the output and what decision or action it feeds, in two sentences. If you cannot name the user, STOP and ask.
  3. Ask the requester two questions and record the answers verbatim:
    • "Show me three real inputs and the outputs you would accept."
    • "What output would make you reject this on sight?"
  4. Golden set. Name the file that will hold the accepted input→output pairs. Target 20 cases minimum. If three real cases cannot be obtained, STOP: the feature is not spec-able yet.
  5. Metric & gate. Write one measurable definition of correctness (e.g., per-field exact-match accuracy) and the pass value (e.g., ≥ 0.90). One metric, one number. Secondary observations (latency, cost) go in a note, not the gate.
  6. Refused tradeoffs. List what this feature will not sacrifice: e.g. "never invent a missing field", "no PII leaves the VPC", "p95 latency under 4 s". Write at least one. A spec with no refused tradeoff is a wish, not a spec.
  7. Blast radius. Write what the feature may write to or send, and what requires human approval (deletes, external sends, spend above $X).
  8. Show the spec to the requester. Record their "yes" or their edits. A spec nobody approved is a draft.
  9. Only then begin build work. Point every later dispute at this file; update the file when the answer changes.

Read the full file on GitHub · 95 lines

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. 10d ago First seen · 95 lines · 47 tokens per session scan A 0249bf135967

Subscribe to this mod's changes

spec-first-ai-feature is a skill published in the GitHub repository zorost/AI-Engineering-Lab (302 stars, last pushed 23d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 47 tokens to every session and 1,064 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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