be-specific-instead-of-vague

be-specific-instead-of-vague is a skill for Claude Code from alivirgo/Major-AI-Skills. It costs 25 tokens per session (1,001 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A prompt-writing method for replacing broad requests with five details: the role, audience, goal, limits, and relevant context. A prompt is the instruction given to an AI system.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when asking an AI to write, edit, explain, or change code with specific requirements.
Why use it?
Vague instructions often produce generic answers and require repeated corrections. Adding these details makes the expected result clearer from the start.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions Codex.

Part of the major-ai-skills plugin — 147 skills, 8 plugins shipped together

Good fit Use it when asking an AI to write, edit, explain, or change code with specific requirements.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/be-specific-instead-of-vague
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 alivirgo/Major-AI-Skills --skill be-specific-instead-of-vague
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alivirgo/Major-AI-Skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install major-ai-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 147 skills, 8 plugins.

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 be-specific-instead-of-vague

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/be-specific-instead-of-vague/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/be-specific-instead-of-vague)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/be-specific-instead-of-vague"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/be-specific-instead-of-vague/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 be-specific-instead-of-vague

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/be-specific-instead-of-vague"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/be-specific-instead-of-vague.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 25 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,001 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.
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 $0.00025 $0.01001
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.00500
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00200
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00100

Measured yesterday against content hash c7031a479427, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

be-specific-instead-of-vague 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 yesterday.

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.

skills/be-specific-instead-of-vague/SKILL.md · 96 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 96 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Be Specific Instead of Vague (The Precision Protocol) (AI Skill)

Overview

The quality of an AI's response is directly proportional to the constraints provided in the prompt. Vague prompts ("Write a blog post about productivity", "Fix my code") trigger the broadest, most generic probability distribution in the LLM, producing bland, predictable text.

The Precision Protocol uses the 5-Variable Specificity Formula to anchor the model to your exact intended context, eliminating 90% of back-and-forth revisions.


The 5-Variable Specificity Formula

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                 The 5-Variable Formula                      │
│                                                             │
│  [ ROLE ]     ──► Who is the AI speaking as?                │
│  [ AUDIENCE ] ──► Who is reading / receiving this?          │
│  [ GOAL ]     ──► What exact outcome must be achieved?      │
│  [ BOUNDARY ] ──► Length, format, and banned elements?      │
│  [ CONTEXT ]  ──► Key facts, data points, or constraints?   │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Real-World Transformations: Vague vs. Specific

Example 1: Email Request to a Colleague

Vague (Low Precision)

"Write an email asking for the sales numbers."

Result: AI writes a 4-paragraph corporate letter starting with "I hope this email finds you well in these busy times..."

Specific (Precision Formula Applied)

"Write a 2-sentence Slack message to our sales lead (Dave) asking for the updated Q2 EMEA revenue spreadsheet by 3 PM today for the board prep meeting. Friendly but urgent tone."

Result: "Hey Dave, could you share the updated Q2 EMEA revenue spreadsheet by 3 PM today? Putting the final slides together for tomorrow's board prep."


Example 2: Code Refactoring

Vague

"Make this Python script faster."

Result: AI adds comments, renames variables, or suggests generic multiprocessing libraries that don't fit the workload.

Read the full file on GitHub · 96 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. yesterday Changed · -11 tokens per session c7031a479427
  2. 7d ago First seen · 96 lines · 36 tokens per session scan A 859fb39b46ed

Subscribe to this mod's changes

be-specific-instead-of-vague is a skill published in the GitHub repository alivirgo/Major-AI-Skills (1 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 25 tokens to every session and 1,001 once invoked, about $0.0001 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 2026-09-05.

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