talk-normal is a system prompt that guides large language models to produce direct, informative responses without filler or corporate-sounding language. It is intended for people using LLMs who want shorter, more natural answers.
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 hexiecs/talk-normal --skill skill-hermesgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hexiecs/talk-normalWrote 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/hexiecs/talk-normal/skill-hermes)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hexiecs/talk-normal/skill-hermes"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hexiecs/talk-normal/skill-hermes/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/hexiecs/talk-normal/skill-hermes"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hexiecs/talk-normal/skill-hermes.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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 | $0.00059 | $0.00736 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00024 | $0.00294 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00012 | $0.00147 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00006 | $0.00074 |
Grade A, and why
talk-normal 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 2mo 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 — 63 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
talk-normal
A curated system prompt that stops your LLM from writing like a LinkedIn post. Measured: 73% character reduction on GPT-4o-mini, 72% on GPT-5.4, across 10 prompts in English and Chinese, without losing information.
When to Use
Run the installer once per workspace to make your Hermes agent permanently less verbose. This is not a per-turn skill — it is a one-time installer that injects always-on rules into your project's context file.
Procedure
To install or update talk-normal in the current workspace:
bash install.sh
The script auto-detects your workspace config file (.hermes.md, HERMES.md, or AGENTS.md) and injects the prompt between # --- talk-normal BEGIN --- and # --- talk-normal END --- markers. The installer is idempotent: running it again replaces the existing talk-normal block in place with the latest rules. Nothing else in your config file is touched.
To remove:
bash install.sh --uninstall
Start a new Hermes session to take effect.
What gets installed
The contents of prompt.md get injected into your workspace config file. The rules target the specific slop patterns that make LLM output sound corporate and padded:
- Filler and hedging — banned opening phrases, no throat-clearing, no restating the question
- Structural discipline — lead with the answer, match depth to complexity, bullets only when genuinely parallel
- Closing patterns — no summary stamps, no hypothetical follow-up offers, no conditional next-step menus
- Rhetorical tics — no negation-based contrastive framing, no plain-language restatements
- Shape of comparisons — give a recommendation with brief reasoning, cap pros/cons lists
Verification
After installing, start a new Hermes session and ask a simple question like "What is Python?". The response should be 3-5 sentences with no filler phrases. Compare against the benchmarks at https://github.com/hexiecs/talk-normal for expected output.
Pitfalls
What ships with it
3 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.
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.
- 2mo ago First seen · 63 lines · 59 tokens per session scan A 09bbb9a3d643
talk-normal is a skill published in the GitHub repository hexiecs/talk-normal (1,868 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 59 tokens to every session and 736 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 2026-08-30.
talk-normal compared with skills from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| talk-normalhexiecs/talk-normal | Skill | 1.9k | 6mo ago | MIT | A | 59 | Claude Code, Codex |
| imagegenopenai/codex | Skill | 133k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 113 | Codex |
| playwright-climicrosoft/playwright | Skill | 99k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 19 | Claude Code |
| local-ai-agentsmicrosoft/ai-agents-for-beginners | Skill | 79k | 4d ago | MIT | A | 200 | Claude Code, Codex |
| systematic-debuggingobra/superpowers | Skill | 313k | 3d ago | MIT | A | 21 | Claude Code |
| next-cache-components-adoptionvercel/next.js | Skill | 143k | yesterday | MIT | A | 95 | Claude Code |
| next-partial-prefetching-adoptionvercel/next.js | Skill | 143k | yesterday | MIT | A | 103 | Claude Code |