ia-writing

ia-writing is a skill for Claude Code from iliaal/whetstone. It costs 72 tokens per session (945 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of writing, MIT.

A writing and editing guide for making human-facing prose clearer and more natural. It covers rewriting, proofreading, tone changes, and identifying patterns that make text sound machine-written.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for documents, blog posts, emails, copy, and other text written for people.
Why use it?
It helps preserve the writer's voice while removing awkward phrasing and clearly separating editing from detection.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the whetstone plugin — 32 skills, 22 commands, 19 agents, 1 hook, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Use it for documents, blog posts, emails, copy, and other text written for people.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install whetstone, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 32 skills, 22 commands, 19 agents, 1 hook, 1 MCP server.

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 ia-writing

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/iliaal/whetstone/ia-writing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/iliaal/whetstone/ia-writing.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 72 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 945 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 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 5.1 $0.00072 $0.00945
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00473
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00189
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00094

Measured 3d ago against content hash 5e4ea8da9bbf, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ia-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 3d 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 — 2 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/whetstone/skills/ia-writing/SKILL.md · 47 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 47 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Human writing

Edit human-facing prose while preserving meaning, factual accuracy, and the writer's voice. User instructions and the intended audience outrank these style preferences. Editing a draft does not authorize posting it.

Modes

  • Edit (default): produce corrected text and a proportionate changelog.
  • Detect: when asked to flag AI tells without rewriting, quote each observed pattern and give a brief fix. Do not rewrite, score, or infer authorship. Use Phase 1 of audit-workflow.md, then stop and offer an edit.
  • Machine-facing text: tool descriptions, system prompts, skill/agent instructions, error strings, and inter-agent messages need precise specification language. Use ia-refine-prompt when appropriate; do not apply fragments, contractions, or invented personal voice mechanically.

Procedure

  1. Identify the draft's core point and 3–5 concrete voice signals to preserve: vocabulary, cadence, bluntness, humor, uncertainty, digressions, and intended polish. Keep this working note out of the delivered text.
  2. Match the requested surface and mode. Short commits, PR descriptions, comments, and posts need a quick audit. Long documents, essays, and reports use the two-phase audit-workflow.md.
  3. Lead with a concrete fact or point. Use active voice, specific actors where relevant, simple words, stable terminology, and meaningful numbers. Keep related words together, one topic per paragraph, and tone appropriate to the audience.
  4. Flag formulaic structures, vague claims, passive evasions, unnecessary qualifiers, artificial contrasts, synonym cycling, mechanical formatting, and fake-profound endings. A flag is a candidate, not a verdict.
  5. Apply restraint: leave natural sentences intact, preserve useful uncertainty, and retain lists/tables that carry real structure. Match the tone problem, not a forbidden token. Do not invent opinions, feelings, facts, or actors to satisfy a stylistic pattern.
  6. Read the result aloud. Check that edits remain proportional and that the writer would recognize the voice. Return the full corrected text when editing; include only the audit/changelog detail appropriate to the request and length.

Read the full file on GitHub · 47 lines

Files

What ships with it

8 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. 3d ago Changed · -135 lines 5e4ea8da9bbf
  2. 4d ago First seen · 182 lines · 72 tokens per session scan A 9638a56282b6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ia-writing is a skill published in the GitHub repository iliaal/whetstone (33 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 72 tokens to every session and 945 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, differing in 2 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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