author

A writing guide for documents that coding agents read, such as skills and project instruction files. It explains how to make those instructions clear and reliable.

In plain words
What is it for?
Writing or editing skills, AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files, deciding when to include information directly, and improving links to supporting documents.
Why use it?
It helps prevent agents from missing important guidance or following it inconsistently because the instructions are vague or poorly organized.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/emaballarin/ccplugins/author
Any agent
npx skills add emaballarin/ccplugins --skill author
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/emaballarin/ccplugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 88 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,587 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 89% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00088 $0.02587
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.01293
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00517
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00259

Measured 2d ago against content hash 783745d0a57a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

author 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 2d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

89% identical to writing-for-agents — 74 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

plugins/mindfunnel/skills/author/SKILL.md · 94 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 94 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/mf:author — writing documents an agent will read

A reference for any document an agent consumes: a skill, an AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md, a file reached by a pointer from either. The packaging differs; the writing does not. The same levers make each one predictable — the agent taking the same process every run, which is not the same as producing the same output.

When the document is a skill, also read references/skill-mechanics.md for frontmatter, the invocation choice, and router skills.

Context pointers

A context pointer is a reference held in the agent's context that names some out-of-context material and encodes the condition for reaching it. A skill's description is one. A line in AGENTS.md naming a doc is the same object. The pointer's wording, not its target, decides when the agent reaches the material — and how reliably. A must-have target behind a weakly worded pointer is a variance bug: sharpen the wording first, and inline the material only if sharpening fails.

A pointer does two jobs — state what the material is, and list the branches that should trigger reaching it (a branch is a distinct case the document handles, so different runs take different paths through it). Every word of an always-loaded pointer costs on every turn, so it earns harder pruning than the body:

  • Front-load the leading word. The pointer is where it does its triggering work.
  • One trigger per branch. Synonyms that rename a single branch are one branch written twice; collapse them and keep only genuinely distinct branches.
  • Cut identity the body already carries.

The two loads

Every document and pointer you add spends one of two budgets:

  • Context load — the cost of always-loaded material on the agent's context window: an AGENTS.md line, a skill description, anything sitting in context every turn, spending tokens and attention whether or not it fires.
  • Cognitive load — the cost on the human: which documents exist, and when to reach for each. The human is the index. This is not a cost to minimise — it is the price of human agency. Spend it where human judgement matters; remove it where it does not.

Read the full file on GitHub · 94 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. 2d ago First seen · 94 lines · 88 tokens per session scan A 783745d0a57a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

author is a skill published in the GitHub repository emaballarin/ccplugins (3 stars, last pushed 26d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 88 tokens to every session and 2,587 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 89% identical to writing-for-agents, differing in 74 lines, and is treated as a copy.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

next-cache-components-adoption

Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…

vercel/next.js · 95 tokens

babysit-pr

Babysit a GitHub pull request after creation by continuously polling review comments, CI checks/workflow runs, and mergeability state until the PR is merged/closed or user help is required. Diagnose failures, retry likely flaky failures up to 3 times, auto-fix/push branch-related issues when appropriate, and keep…

openai/codex · 114 tokens

imagegen

Generate or edit raster images when the task benefits from AI-created bitmap visuals such as photos, illustrations, textures, sprites, mockups, or transparent-background cutouts. Use when Codex should create a brand-new image, transform an existing image, or derive visual variants from references, and the output…

openai/codex · 113 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens

next-cache-components-optimizer

Drive a Next.js route to instant navigation by setting up an agentic loop, under Cache Components / PPR, on initial load (hard navigation) and client-side navigation (soft navigation). Encode the goal as a failing @next/playwright instant() e2e and work it to green, one verified route at a time; the shipped test then…

vercel/next.js · 170 tokens