What is bob-hoffman-voice?

A style guide based on Bob Hoffman’s plain, sceptical commentary about advertising technology. It uses short statements, irony, and direct challenges to complicated marketing claims.

Use it for essays, newsletters, and posts criticising ad technology, targeting claims, or marketing industry habits.

It helps an agent explain marketing criticism without hiding behind industry jargon. The style makes the central argument easy to identify and difficult to mistake for neutral promotional copy.

bob-hoffman-voice — Skill for Claude Code by jpeslar1

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 jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills --skill bob-hoffman-voice

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install voice-dna, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 79 skills.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/bob-hoffman-voice/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/bob-hoffman-voice)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/bob-hoffman-voice"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/bob-hoffman-voice/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/bob-hoffman-voice"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/bob-hoffman-voice.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 225 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 4,036 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 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00225	$0.04036
Opus 5.5	$0.00090	$0.01614
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00045	$0.00807
Haiku 4.5	$0.00022	$0.00404

Measured 17d ago against content hash a56f6f1b5cc3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

bob-hoffman-voice 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 17d 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.

bob-hoffman-voice/SKILL.md · 176 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 176 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Bob Hoffman Voice DNA

Bob Hoffman is the irritant who was right. For more than a decade The Ad Contrarian has said the same thing in the same plain words: consumers do not care about your brand, precision targeting is a contrivance, data is available to everyone, adtech is a fraud factory, and the industry complicates the shit out of a simple idea called fame. The voice builds a premise out of short declaratives or a list of toasters and paper clips, then flips it with one line in its own paragraph. He mocks himself as much as his targets ("The Ad Contrarian Worldwide Headquarters", "annoying dickheads like me", "my dog Roscoe") and never raises his voice; the profanity is a precise word, not a shout. Ground every output in references/voice-corpus.md (verbatim excerpts) and references/source-map.md (sources and refresh notes).

Voice DNA

Cadence and rhythm

Short declarative sentences of 8-14 words, stacked in paragraphs of one to three sentences. Nothing is subordinated that can be made its own sentence.
The setup is a run of parallel lines ("Yes, having a strong brand is very valuable. Yes, the highest goal of advertising is to create a strong brand.") and the turn is one line: "Now, let's get to the bullshit."
The punchline is always its own paragraph and usually under eight words: "No shit." / "Sorry." / "End of story." / "Not this blogweasel."
Lists of ordinary objects stretch a sentence to comic length before the short line lands: washing machines, socks with holes, toilets, teeth that hurt, rent to pay.
Anaphora drives the middle: "Let's pretend... And let's also pretend... And let's also pretend..." / "Do you think Coke... Do you think McDonald's... Do you think Facebook..."
Out loud (corpus items 101-110) the stacks survive ("The problem is not advertising. The problem is tracking. The problem is spying."), with restarts, self-deprecating asides ("The legend means I'm old, right?"), and profanity mid-sentence rather than saved for the closer.
Native length: a 300-600 word blog post or newsletter section; the Campaign UK piece is the long outlier at essay length.

Read the full file on GitHub · 176 lines

Files

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.

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.

17d ago Changed · +1 lines a56f6f1b5cc3
18d ago First seen · 175 lines · 225 tokens per session scan A 9f1f3a8889f6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

bob-hoffman-voice is a skill published in the GitHub repository jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills (12 stars, last pushed 18d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 225 tokens to every session and 4,036 once invoked, about $0.0009 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 2026-10-19.

Marketing and SEO Writing and docs

bob-hoffman-voice next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
bob-hoffman-voicejpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills	Skill	12	18d ago	MIT	A	225	Claude Code
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local-ai-agentsmicrosoft/ai-agents-for-beginners	Skill	79k	4d ago	MIT	A	200	Claude Code, Codex
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