Design First

by rohitg00

Design First is a Quality skill for Claude Code, published by rohitg00 in skillkit.

1.5K stars137 forkson rohitg00/skillkitAdded 2026/08/19+1% in starsRepository updated 2026/06/02

View source on GitHub Download repo ZIP

agent-skillsagentskillsaiclicodexcursorgeminiopencodeskills

Install in seconds

Install Design First

Copy Design First into your Claude Code skills folder. Run the command in your terminal, or review the source on GitHub before installing.

terminal

npx degit https://github.com/rohitg00/skillkit/tree/main/packages/core/src/methodology/packs/planning/design-first ~/.claude/skills/design-first

Requires Node.js. Downloads this skill only — not the rest of the repository — into your Claude Code skills folder.

Without Node.js

git clone https://github.com/rohitg00/skillkit.git

Clones the whole repository, then copy the skill’s own directory into your skills folder yourself.

In this catalog

Source file: packages/core/src/methodology/packs/planning/design-first/SKILL.md in rohitg00/skillkit
Installs to: ~/.claude/skills/design-first
Collection: One of 17 skills cataloged from this repository
Category: Quality — 1354 skills

What Design First does

Design First guides creation of technical design documents before coding, producing architecture diagrams, data models, API definitions, implementation plans, and trade-off analyses. Use when planning a feature, architecting a system, or designing an API.

Design First is cataloged under Quality on DirSkills. Design First comes from a repository tagged agent-skills, agentskills, ai, cli and codex.

Documentation

README

Excerpt

Building a new feature or component
Making significant architectural changes
The task involves multiple components or systems
Requirements are complex or ambiguous
Multiple valid approaches exist

Skip for trivial changes (typos, simple bug fixes, config changes).

Design Process

Phase 1: Understand the Problem

Before designing, ensure clarity on:

This is the opening of the README. Read the full README on GitHub.

Frequently asked about Design First

What else does rohitg00 publish alongside Design First?
Design First is one of 17 skills that DirSkills catalogs from rohitg00/skillkit, the repository it ships in. Its siblings there include Eval Injection Test, Find Skills and General Assistant. Each one is a separate skill with its own page in this directory, installs the same way Design First does, and is maintained by rohitg00 in that same repository. The rest of the collection is listed on the rohitg00/skillkit page.
How does Design First compare to other Quality skills?
Design First ranks #660 by stars among the 1354 Quality skills in this catalog. The most-starred ones next to it are Benchmark, Benchmark Optimization Loop and API Design Patterns. DirSkills ranks by the star count of the repository each skill ships in, so that order reflects how popular those repositories are rather than any review of Design First against them. Open each page to compare what they document and how they install.