technical-writing

technical-writing is a skill for Claude Code from chhoumann/t3-pstack. It costs 52 tokens per session (2,077 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of rules for writing clear technical documents. It covers documents such as READMEs, design proposals, pull-request descriptions, and commit messages.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write or review developer documentation, design documents, READMEs, pull-request descriptions, and commit messages.
Why use it?
It removes unnecessary words, unclear phrasing, and unexplained jargon so engineers can understand the text on the first read.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter.

Part of the t3-pstack plugin — 62 skills, 4 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it to write or review developer documentation, design documents, READMEs, pull-request descriptions, and commit messages.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/chhoumann/t3-pstack/technical-writing
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 chhoumann/t3-pstack --skill technical-writing
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/chhoumann/t3-pstack

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install t3-pstack, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 62 skills, 4 agents, 1 hook.

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 technical-writing

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/chhoumann/t3-pstack/technical-writing/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/chhoumann/t3-pstack/technical-writing)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/chhoumann/t3-pstack/technical-writing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/chhoumann/t3-pstack/technical-writing/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 technical-writing

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/chhoumann/t3-pstack/technical-writing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/chhoumann/t3-pstack/technical-writing.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,077 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 $0.00052 $0.02077
Opus 5.5 $0.00021 $0.00831
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00010 $0.00415
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00208

Measured yesterday against content hash 61fe9c424a79, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

technical-writing 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

2 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

plugins/pstack/skills/technical-writing/SKILL.md · 107 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 107 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Technical writing

Write so a tired engineer understands on the first read. Apply all four layers.

Three rules sit above the layers:

  • Cut every word that does no work. If the sentence survives without a word, the word goes. "In order to" is "to". "It is important to note that" is nothing.
  • Use the short, everyday word. "Use", not "utilize". "Help", not "facilitate". "Do", not "perform". A long word has to buy its length with precision.
  • When a rule makes a sentence worse, fix the sentence another way or leave it alone. A sentence that follows every rule and sounds like a machine wrote it has failed.

The codebase is the word list. Write the real symbol, file, flag, or command name, not a synonym or a description of it.

Don't invent jargon. Use the words a developer would say out loud: "move", "delete", "a budget that only decreases", not "evacuate", "ratchet", or "endgame". A named pattern is fine when the doc says what it means the first time. Propose a new offender and its replacement as an addition to unslop's abstract-metaphor rule in your reply, with the diff. Don't edit that skill.

Vary the rhythm

A doc can obey every layer and still read machine-written: every sentence clipped short, no view anywhere, nothing specific.

  • Mix sentence lengths on purpose. Short sentences land a point. Longer ones carry a fact with its condition or consequence.
  • One thought per sentence does not mean one length per sentence. Split the sentence that carries two thoughts. Keep the long sentence that carries one.
  • Have a view where the mode allows it. Explanation weighs trade-offs, so say what you make of them instead of listing pros and cons. Reference stays dry.
  • Be specific over sterile. Not "schema changes can cause issues" but "a column rename fails the build".

Pick the mode first (Diátaxis)

One document, one mode. Two questions pick it: does the content inform action (doing) or understanding (thinking), and does it serve learning or work?

Read the full file on GitHub · 107 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 · +1 lines 61fe9c424a79
  2. 3d ago First seen · 106 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A 7a6c08c90548

Subscribe to this mod's changes

technical-writing is a skill published in the GitHub repository chhoumann/t3-pstack (190 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 2,077 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-10-13.

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