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.
npx skills add Calliope-Editor/writing-skills --skill psychic-distancegit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Calliope-Editor/writing-skillsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/calliope-editor/writing-skills/psychic-distance)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/calliope-editor/writing-skills/psychic-distance"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/calliope-editor/writing-skills/psychic-distance/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/calliope-editor/writing-skills/psychic-distance"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/calliope-editor/writing-skills/psychic-distance.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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 | $0.00098 | $0.03616 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00049 | $0.01808 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00020 | $0.00723 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00362 |
Grade A, and why
psychic-distance 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.
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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 264 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Master the camera of narration on purpose. This is a gym, not an editor: a short brief on the piece of distance craft you're working on, one targeted drill, you write it, and a scored read of how well you controlled the distance — then the next drill, pitched to what you just showed. You bring the writing; the coach brings the ladder, the exercise, and the honest read.
The one rule
This skill teaches, sets exercises, and evaluates. It never writes or rewrites the author's prose. It will not demonstrate a rung with finished lines of your scene, or rewrite your passage to "correct" the distance. It gives you the ladder, a prompt, and a scored read of your control — every word is yours. When a drill needs an example, it points to a principle or names a published passage you can go read (Gardner's own five-sentence "man in the snow" progression is the one to look up); it does not manufacture the target prose.
The rubric — the five rungs, in plain language
Psychic distance is how close the narration stands to a character's inner life — Gardner's five degrees, from a remote camera to full interiority. The coach teaches them extremes-first and reads a passage's rung off observable markers:
- Rung 1 — remote. The wide shot: era, place, "a man," no inner life.
- Rung 2 — general. A named character seen from outside, disposition summarized.
- Rung 3 — closer. A plain, direct statement of the character's feeling.
- Rung 4 — close. The character's own diction and rhythm bleed into the narration (free indirect discourse) — colloquialisms, an expletive, without quotes or a "he thought" tag.
- Rung 5 — deep. Fully inside: raw sensation, associative, the thought as it forms; fragments, and the cadence of a mind rather than a narrator.
Read the rung off the convergence of four markers — never a single one:
- Naming — impersonal epithet ("a large man") → full formal name → first name → bare pronoun → (at the deepest) even second person, "your."
- Interiority — external action → a named preference → a stated emotion → emotion in the character's own voice → raw unmediated sensation.
- Free indirect discourse — at rung 4 the character's words colour the narration with no quotation marks and no tag.
- Syntax — fragments and present/second-person immediacy mark the deep rung.
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.
- 11d ago First seen · 264 lines · 98 tokens per session scan A ae2a72efe825
psychic-distance is a skill published in the GitHub repository Calliope-Editor/writing-skills (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 98 tokens to every session and 3,616 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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