influence

influence is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from getagentseal/founder-playbook. It costs 105 tokens per session (3,496 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to common principles of persuasion, such as social proof, authority, scarcity, and consistency, along with ways to recognise manipulative tactics.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when writing ethical marketing or sales messages, negotiating, designing cooperative systems, or checking campaigns for manipulation.
Why use it?
It helps explain why people cooperate or respond to messages, while noting that some claims from the source book are disputed or outdated.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

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/getagentseal/founder-playbook/influence
Any agent
npx skills add getagentseal/founder-playbook --skill influence
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/getagentseal/founder-playbook

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.

agentmods badge for influence

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/getagentseal/founder-playbook/influence.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/getagentseal/founder-playbook/influence)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/getagentseal/founder-playbook/influence"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/getagentseal/founder-playbook/influence.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 105 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,496 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00105 $0.03496
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.01748
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00699
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00350

Measured 6d ago against content hash 0815791bbda6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

influence 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 6d 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.

influence/SKILL.md · 276 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 276 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Note: This skill is independent analysis and commentary, not a reproduction of the original text. It synthesizes the book's core ideas with modern startup practice, surfaces where frameworks are outdated or incomplete, and integrates perspectives from adjacent disciplines. For the full argument and context, read the original book.

Influence

"Click-whirr. The triggers fire and we react automatically." - Robert Cialdini

When to Use

  • Crafting persuasion (marketing, sales copy, negotiation)
  • Defending against manipulation (recognizing when you're being clicked)
  • Designing systems that need cooperation
  • Diagnosing why some campaigns work and others don't

Critical Caveats (Read First)

This skill is about a 1984 book with significant replication issues. Several specific cited numbers are wrong or contested. Treat the principles as TACTICAL RECOGNITION FRAMEWORKS, not precise math.

Known Replication Concerns

Issue Status
Kitty Genovese "38 witnesses" myth Factually false. Manning, Levine & Collins (2007, American Psychologist) debunked. Most "witnesses" couldn't see/hear, several DID call police. Cialdini repeats the false narrative; this skill DOES NOT use Genovese as evidence. We rely only on the lab studies (Latane & Darley) which DO replicate.
Bargh-style priming Largely failed to replicate
Ego depletion Failed multiple replications
Milgram 65% From ONE of 24 conditions. Range was 0-92%. Burger 2009 partial replication ~70% (capped at 150V). Perry 2012 archival critique disputes Milgram's reporting.
Romeo-Juliet effect Contested by Sinclair (2014)
Halo-effect numbers Generally shrunken on replication
"Because" experiment Effect collapses for higher-cost requests
DITF backfire condition If first request is too extreme, you appear unreasonable and lose the second
Hofling 95% Original 1966 number. Modern replications find 16-30% (nurses now have explicit refusal training).
Bystander effect in clear emergencies Fischer et al. 2011 meta-analysis: groups DO help more when threat is clear. Reverses original finding.

Read the full file on GitHub · 276 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files 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.

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. 6d ago First seen · 276 lines · 105 tokens per session scan A 0815791bbda6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

influence is a skill published in the GitHub repository getagentseal/founder-playbook (539 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 105 tokens to every session and 3,496 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 2026-08-30.

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

local-ai-agents

Build local-first AI agents that run entirely on a developer workstation with Microsoft Foundry Local and Qwen function-calling models. Covers Small Language Models (SLMs), the OpenAI-compatible local endpoint, sandboxed local tools, local RAG with Chroma, local MCP servers, hybrid cloud/local routing, and the…

microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners · 200 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

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

next-partial-prefetching-adoption

Turn on Partial Prefetching in a Next.js app and work through the insights it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable or adopt Partial Prefetching, flip the partialPrefetching flag, opt routes in with export const prefetch = 'partial', audit Link prefetch={true} behavior, preserve existing prefetched UI with…

vercel/next.js · 103 tokens

chronicle

Analyze Copilot session history for standup reports, usage tips, session search, and session reindexing. Use when the user asks for a standup, daily summary, usage tips, workflow recommendations, wants to search or find past sessions by keyword/file/PR, wants to reindex their session store, or asks about deleting…

microsoft/vscode · 72 tokens