recommendation-letters

recommendation-letters is a skill for Claude Code from adamwstauffer/shidler. It costs 139 tokens per session (1,896 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing guide for recommendation and reference letters for Adam W. Stauffer's students at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa's Shidler College of Business.

In plain words
What is it for?
Drafting or revising letters for graduate, MBA, law, scholarship, study-abroad, and similar applications using verified facts.
Why use it?
It keeps letters in the established writing style while requiring every specific claim to come from information the student supplied.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths.

Good fit Drafting or revising letters for graduate, MBA, law, scholarship, study-abroad, and similar applications using verified facts.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/adamwstauffer/shidler/recommendation-letters
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 adamwstauffer/shidler --skill recommendation-letters
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/adamwstauffer/shidler

Made for: Claude Code.

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 recommendation-letters

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/adamwstauffer/shidler/recommendation-letters/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/adamwstauffer/shidler/recommendation-letters)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/adamwstauffer/shidler/recommendation-letters"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/adamwstauffer/shidler/recommendation-letters/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 recommendation-letters

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/adamwstauffer/shidler/recommendation-letters"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/adamwstauffer/shidler/recommendation-letters.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 139 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,896 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 $0.00139 $0.01896
Opus 5 $0.00069 $0.00948
Sonnet 5 $0.00028 $0.00379
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00190

Measured 11d ago against content hash c71f809f9192, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

recommendation-letters 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 11d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/build_letter.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

.claude/skills/recommendation-letters/SKILL.md · 127 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 127 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Recommendation Letters

Draft recommendation and reference letters for Adam W. Stauffer's students in his established house style, working only from verified facts.

Ground rule: verify, never invent (non-negotiable)

Every substantive claim in a letter must come from a source the student actually supplied — a grade from the gradebook/transcript, a fact from their résumé, an objective stated in their own words (email, personal statement). Never infer, estimate, or fabricate grades, GPAs, employers, job titles, dates, achievements, career goals, or motivations.

  • If a needed fact is missing, leave a generic placeholder or ask the user — do not guess.
  • Placeholders stay generic and descriptive: <FIN 321 grade>, <student's stated objective>, <employer / role from résumé>.
  • Never write a specific value you have not verified, not even as a placeholder — e.g. never <A+>, never a made-up firm or figure. A specific-looking placeholder reads as a real fact once the brackets are removed, which is exactly the failure this rule prevents.
  • This applies to characterizations too: don't assert a student "excelled" or was "top of the class" unless the record supports it.

When unsure whether something is verified, treat it as unverified.

Where things live

  • Master template (canonical, fill-in): assets/master-recommendation-template.docx in this skill. It holds the fixed scaffold (bio + signature verbatim), a paste-ready course block for every course Adam teaches (BUS 313 / 314 / FIN 321 / BUS 620 / BUS 629 / BUS 122B), purpose-line and closing-line menus, combo guidance, and style notes. Every fill-in is a generic <green field>.
  • Finished letters + student materials: recommendations/<YYYY-MM>-<lastname>-<firstname>/ at the repo root. This tree is gitignored (student PII); see recommendations/README.md. Date = the letter's authored month. Multi-target applicants keep one folder with a file per school/employer.
  • Grades to fill <course grade> fields come from the gradebook, not memory. Gradebooks are consolidated under each offering's ignore/<YYYY-Season>/grades/. The *_FinalGrades_*.xlsx exports carry the letter grade in column P (and the numeric in column O); the plain *_Grades_*.csv exports carry only the number — convert those with the SSOT scale in docs/grading-scale.md or scripts/grading/letter_grade.py (e.g. python scripts/grading/letter_grade.py 92A-). Never guess a letter from a number — read column P or apply the scale.

Read the full file on GitHub · 127 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 11d ago First seen · 127 lines · 139 tokens per session scan A c71f809f9192

Subscribe to this mod's changes

recommendation-letters is a skill published in the GitHub repository adamwstauffer/shidler (10 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 139 tokens to every session and 1,896 once invoked, about $0.0007 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 2026-08-31.

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