What is dan-koe-voice?

A writing guide based on Dan Koe's style for long essays, creator newsletters, and one-person-business writing. It focuses on connected ideas about identity, attention, work, money, and the internet.

Use it to draft or revise long-form creator essays and newsletters in this particular voice. It is suited to writing about psychology, goals, business, and online work.

It gives writing a consistent structure and rhythm instead of producing disconnected tips or generic business copy. It also points to source and reference files for grounding the voice.

dan-koe-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 dan-koe-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/dan-koe-voice/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/dan-koe-voice)

Your own site

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

Per session 180 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 3,301 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	$0.00180	$0.03301
Opus 5.5	$0.00072	$0.01320
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00036	$0.00660
Haiku 4.5	$0.00018	$0.00330

Measured 18d ago against content hash 8d83990f98ce, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

dan-koe-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 18d 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.

dan-koe-voice/SKILL.md · 188 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 188 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Dan Koe Voice DNA

Dan Koe writes business essays that are actually psychology essays. The subject is usually money, attention, or work, but the argument always runs through identity, goals, and how the mind filters reality. The register is long-form and hypnotic: paragraphs that build a conceptual chain, then a single line that lands the whole thing, then a practical instruction so the reader has something to do. He is unapologetically philosophical and unapologetically commercial at the same time, and the voice only works when both halves are present. Ground every output in references/voice-corpus.md (verbatim excerpts) and references/source-map.md (sources and refresh notes).

Voice DNA

Cadence and rhythm

Long essays, 1500 to 4000 words, with an unbroken conceptual arc rather than a list of tips.
Alternating density: three or four dense conceptual sentences, then a one-line paragraph that lands them.
Chains of consequence written as sequential lines. Experiences shape identity. Identity is goals and values. Goals shape point of view. Point of view shapes decisions. Decisions reinforce identity.
Anaphora in runs of three. "You're starting to notice that you've stalled out. You're starting to notice that every day is the same as the last."
Section headers are compressed theses, three to six words: "Discipline is a feature of identity", "Limbo is the laboratory", "The most profitable niche is you".

Hook patterns

The conditional verdict - open with the rule and the penalty in one line. "If you have to force yourself to do it, you will lose."
The diagnosis of the reader - describe what they are doing wrong before they have admitted it. "Most creators have become content factories."
The inverted cliche - take standard advice and reverse it in the title. "Self-discipline is easy, actually." "You don't need a niche, you need a point of view."
The mechanism promise - name the psychological process the essay will explain and use to solve the problem.
The borrowed epigraph - open a section with a quote from Naval, Maltz, or another thinker, then extend it.
The reader's objection in their own voice - quote the complaint back with an exclamation mark, then answer it.

Read the full file on GitHub · 188 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.

18d ago Changed · +180 tokens per session 8d83990f98ce
1mo ago First seen · 188 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A e0fa3a91b785

Subscribe to this mod's changes

dan-koe-voice is a skill published in the GitHub repository jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills (12 stars, last pushed 18d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 180 tokens to every session and 3,301 once invoked, about $0.0007 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 2026-09-09.

Writing and docs

dan-koe-voice next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
dan-koe-voicejpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills	Skill	12	18d ago	MIT	A	180	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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