Codebase Design

Shared vocabulary for designing deep modules. Use when the user wants to design or improve a module's interface, find deepening opportunities, decide where a seam goes, make code more testable or AI-navigable, or when another skill needs the deep-module vocabulary.

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Install

Claude Code plugin
/plugin marketplace add mattpocock/skills

The repo is a Claude Code plugin marketplace. Run /plugin afterwards to pick the plugin that includes this skill.

skills CLI (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and more)
npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill codebase-design
Manual install
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mattpocock/skills.git /tmp/skills
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -r /tmp/skills/skills/engineering/codebase-design ~/.claude/skills/codebase-design

Personal skills live in ~/.claude/skills. Use .claude/skills in a project folder to share a skill with your team.

From the SKILL.md

# Codebase Design

Design **deep modules**: a lot of behaviour behind a small interface, placed at a clean seam, testable through that interface. Use this language and these principles wherever code is being designed or restructured. The aim is leverage for callers, locality for maintainers, and testability for everyone.

## Glossary

Use these terms exactly: don't substitute "component," "service," "API," or "boundary." Consistent language is the whole point.

**Module**: anything with an interface and an implementation. Deliberately scale-agnostic: a function, class, package, or tier-spanning slice. _Avoid_: unit, component, service.

**Interface**: everything a caller must know to use the module correctly: the type signature, but also invariants, ordering constraints, error modes, required configuration, and performance characteristics. _Avoid_: API, signature (too narrow, they refer only to the type-level surface).

**Implementation**: what's inside a module, its body of code. Distinct from **Adapter**: a thing can be a small adapter with a large implementation (a Postgres repo) or a large adapter with a small implementation (an in-memory fake). Reach for "adapter" when the seam is the topic; "implementation" otherwise.
Read the full skill on GitHub

Details

Skill name
codebase-design
Path
skills/engineering/codebase-design/SKILL.md
License
MIT
Repo updated
30 October 2026

FAQ

What does the Codebase Design skill do?

Shared vocabulary for designing deep modules. Use when the user wants to design or improve a module's interface, find deepening opportunities, decide where a seam goes, make code more testable or AI-navigable, or when another skill needs the deep-module vocabulary.

How do I install the Codebase Design skill?

Claude Code plugin: /plugin marketplace add mattpocock/skills. Skills go in ~/.claude/skills (personal) or .claude/skills (project), and Claude loads them automatically when a task matches the description.

Is Codebase Design popular?

It lives in mattpocock/skills, which has 307,829 GitHub stars and 25,903 forks, and is included in 1 curated skill list.

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