sisyphus-design

sisyphus-design

A skill that produces high-quality design documents through iterative refinement. Supports both Claude Code and Codex.

Philosophy

The boulder rolls back. That's the point.

Sisyphus wasn't punished for failing — he was punished for trying. Camus said imagine him happy. We say imagine him useful: each push leaves the boulder a little higher than before.

This plugin drafts a design and hands it to a reviewer who has never seen it and never will again. The reviewer finds what the author couldn't. The author fixes it. A new reviewer — equally blind, equally merciless — checks the fix. The boulder rolls back. It goes up again.

Your time enters where machines can't substitute. Everything else is the hill.

What it does

/sisyphus-design <requirement> runs a multi-phase process:

1. Research & Diverge — investigates the codebase and domain, thinks from first principles, generates 2-3 fundamentally different approaches
2. Interrogate — presents the critical path, approaches, and questions that reveal which approach fits your constraints
3. Decisions — presents key decisions for approval with trade-offs and a concrete example trace
4. Draft & Refine — drafts the design, then runs independent evaluators until the design stabilizes
5. Review — you read and comment on the design file
6. Refine & Deliver — addresses your comments through the same process, delivers the final design

Three human touchpoints. Everything else is automated.

Install

Claude Code

/plugin marketplace add arkbriar/sisyphus-design
/plugin install sisyphus-design

Codex

Copy the skill into your Codex skills directory:

cp -r codex ~/.codex/skills/sisyphus-design

Enable the request_user_input tool so the skill can pause for your input during human phases:

codex features enable default_mode_request_user_input

Usage

/sisyphus-design Distributed task queue with at-least-once delivery, backed by PostgreSQL, implemented in Rust

In Codex, invoke with $sisyphus-design or let it trigger automatically from the description.

The design is written to design/ in your project (e.g., design/distributed-task-queue.md).

Example

• DistributedTaskQueue — designed and implemented end-to-end with this skill

Reuse

The methodology here is a harness at the meta level — the iterative loop of draft, evaluate, fix is not specific to software design. The checklist (skills/design/checklist.md) can be extracted and applied to any structured document where consistency, coverage, and minimality matter.

License

MIT