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 hon454/grimoire --skill writing-great-skillsgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hon454/grimoireWrote 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/hon454/grimoire/writing-great-skills)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hon454/grimoire/writing-great-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hon454/grimoire/writing-great-skills/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/hon454/grimoire/writing-great-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hon454/grimoire/writing-great-skills.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 | $0.00024 | $0.02024 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00012 | $0.01012 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00005 | $0.00405 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00002 | $0.00202 |
Grade A, and why
writing-great-skills 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.
This is a copy
94% identical to writing-great-skills — 7 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 84 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
A skill exists to wrangle determinism out of a stochastic system. Predictability — the agent taking the same process every run, not producing the same output — is the root virtue; every lever below serves it.
Bold terms are defined in GLOSSARY.md; look them up there for the full meaning.
Invocation
Two choices, trading different costs:
- A model-invoked skill keeps a description, so the agent can fire it autonomously and other skills can reach it (you can still type its name too). It contributes to context load — the description sits in the window every turn. Mechanics: allow implicit invocation in the Codex sidecar
agents/openai.yaml, and write a model-facing description with rich trigger phrasing ("Use when the user wants…, mentions…"). - A user-invoked skill strips the description from the agent's reach: only you, typing its name, can invoke it — and no other skill can. Zero context load, but it spends cognitive load: you are the index that must remember it exists. Mechanics: set
policy.allow_implicit_invocation: falsein the Codex sidecaragents/openai.yaml; thedescriptionbecomes human-facing — a one-line summary, trigger lists stripped.
Pick model-invocation only when the agent must reach the skill on its own, or another skill must. If it only ever fires by hand, make it user-invoked and pay no context load.
When user-invoked skills multiply past what you can remember, that piled-up cognitive load is cured by a router skill: one user-invoked skill that names the others and when to reach for each.
Writing the description
A model-invoked description does two jobs — state what the skill is, and list the branches that should trigger it. Every word increases context load, so a description earns even harder pruning than the body:
- Front-load the skill's leading word — the description is where it does its invocation work.
- One trigger per branch. Synonyms that rename a single branch are duplication — "build features using TDD … asks for test-first development" is one branch written twice. Collapse them; keep only genuinely distinct branches.
- Cut identity that's already in the body. Keep the description to triggers, plus any "when another skill needs…" reach clause.
What ships with it
2 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.
- 11d ago First seen · 84 lines · 24 tokens per session scan A 834885dbfb92
writing-great-skills is a skill published in the GitHub repository hon454/grimoire (2 stars, last pushed 23d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 24 tokens to every session and 2,024 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 94% identical to writing-great-skills, differing in 7 lines, and is treated as a copy.
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