A workflow for configuring or applying Vale, a tool that checks writing against style rules. It covers the current configuration keys, repository hooks, and a process for resolving findings by improving the prose.

Use it to add or troubleshoot Vale, revise its configuration, review its findings, or clean up writing failures in interactive and pre-commit checks.

It helps explain why Vale is passing silently or reporting too much, while avoiding unnecessary disabling of useful style checks.

vale — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by alunduil

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 alunduil/alunduil-chezmoi --skill vale

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alunduil/alunduil-chezmoi

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alunduil/alunduil-chezmoi/vale/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/alunduil/alunduil-chezmoi/vale)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alunduil/alunduil-chezmoi/vale"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alunduil/alunduil-chezmoi/vale/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alunduil/alunduil-chezmoi/vale"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alunduil/alunduil-chezmoi/vale.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 96 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 4,496 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00096	$0.04496
Opus 5	$0.00048	$0.02248
Sonnet 5	$0.00019	$0.00899
Haiku 4.5	$0.00010	$0.00450

Measured 12d ago against content hash 15d27cc7bd14, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vale 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 12d ago.

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.

dot_claude/skills/vale/SKILL.md · 239 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 239 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Vale

Config keys: https://vale.sh/docs/keys/. Current Vale 3.x key set is: BasedOnStyles, BlockIgnores, CommentDelimiters, IgnoredClasses, IgnoredScopes, MinAlertLevel, Packages, SkippedScopes, StylesPath, TokenIgnores, Transform, Vocab. Anything else is stale.

Comply, don't demote

When a loaded rule fires, rewrite the prose to comply — don't demote or disable the rule. A firing rule is usually a real style nit worth adopting; restoring a package default typically costs zero current findings and often surfaces a legitimate fix (Microsoft.Contractions catching does not → doesn't).

Demotion (= suggestion), disable (= NO), and scoping are the last resort, reserved for rules wrong for the writing style itself:

Microsoft.Dashes wanting tight em-dashes when the project's style uses spaced.
Microsoft.HeadingColons demanding sentence case after a colon when ADR/Nygard convention differs.

Confirm the rule contradicts an intentional style choice before silencing it — inconvenience isn't enough. Tuning from the issue framing ("Vale fights writing, silence the noisy rules") rather than the actual per-finding cost is the failure mode this guards against.

Defaults

StylesPath = .vale/styles
MinAlertLevel = warning
Packages = Microsoft, proselint, alex
Vocab = <Project>

[*.md]
BasedOnStyles = Vale, Microsoft, proselint, alex

StylesPath — relative to .vale.ini. .vale/styles keeps the tree hidden. Commit <StylesPath>/config/vocabularies/; gitignore the auto-downloaded package subdirectories Vale writes under <StylesPath>/ on vale sync. Migration: Vale 2.x put vocabularies under <StylesPath>/Vocab/; 3.x moved to <StylesPath>/config/vocabularies/.
MinAlertLevel — suggestion (Vale default), warning, error. Gates display only; Vale exits nonzero whenever any error-severity finding exists regardless of this setting. Set it to the lowest level you want printed on interactive vale . runs; pass --minAlertLevel=error to pre-commit to suppress non-error noise from hook output.
Packages — comma-separated. Names from vale-cli/packages, URLs to a .zip, or local paths. Resolvable bare names today: Microsoft, Google, write-good, proselint, Joblint, alex, Readability, RedHat, AsciiDoc, OpenShiftAsciiDoc, Elastic, NoAnimalViolence (style packages), plus Hugo, MDX (config packages that teach Vale about non-standard markup, not rule sets). Local files under <StylesPath>/ override packages; later Packages entries override earlier.
Vocab — see Vocabularies below. References <Project> so create the directory plus accept.txt/reject.txt on greenfield.
[*.md] BasedOnStyles — without a per-format section, no rules from Packages actually run and Vale silently reports zero findings. Add per format you lint ([*.{md,mdx}], [*.rst]). The built-in Vale style must be listed for Vale.Terms, Vale.Avoid, Vale.Spelling to fire. Disable individual rules with Style.Rule = NO.

Read the full file on GitHub · 239 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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.

accept.txt 1.4 KB

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.

12d ago First seen · 239 lines · 96 tokens per session scan A 15d27cc7bd14

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vale is a skill published in the GitHub repository alunduil/alunduil-chezmoi (2 stars, last pushed today), licensed 0BSD. It adds 96 tokens to every session and 4,496 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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