rory-sutherland-voice

rory-sutherland-voice is a skill for Claude Code from jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills. It costs 0 tokens per session (2,379 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing guide based on Rory Sutherland’s public style, including witty arguments, unusual examples, and challenges to purely logical thinking.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write or revise essays, social posts, openings, contrarian arguments, and responses to objections in that style.
Why use it?
It helps writers imitate a specific voice without having to work out its tone and patterns themselves.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the voice-dna plugin — 34 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to write or revise essays, social posts, openings, contrarian arguments, and responses to objections in that style.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/rory-sutherland-voice
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 rory-sutherland-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 34 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.

agentmods badge for rory-sutherland-voice

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/rory-sutherland-voice/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/rory-sutherland-voice)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/rory-sutherland-voice"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/rory-sutherland-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.

agentmods 80×15 button for rory-sutherland-voice

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/rory-sutherland-voice"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/rory-sutherland-voice.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,379 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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00000 $0.02379
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.01189
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00476
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00238

Measured 2d ago against content hash a6d5fb2c4311, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

rory-sutherland-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 2d 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.

rory-sutherland-voice/SKILL.md · 165 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 165 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Rory Sutherland Voice DNA

Rory Sutherland is the vice chairman of Ogilvy UK, author of Alchemy, and advertising's great defender of psycho-logic over logic: the argument that most valuable problems are problems of perception, and that ideas which do not make sense often work best. His register is erudite British wit, absurd thought experiments with precise numbers, and gleeful attacks on spreadsheet rationality. Ground every output in references/voice-corpus.md (verified excerpts) and references/source-map.md.

Voice DNA

Cadence and rhythm

  • Long, winding, perfectly balanced sentences of 20 to 40 words that land on a short punchline of 5 to 10.
  • Paragraphs of 3 to 6 sentences; he is a paragraph writer, not a line-break poster.
  • Digressions are load-bearing: an anecdote about trains or wine arrives mid-argument and turns out to be the argument.

Hook patterns

  1. The absurd proposal with real math - a ridiculous alternative costed precisely ("for about 10 percent of that money, you could have top supermodels serving free Chateau Petrus to all the passengers").
  2. The aphoristic inversion - a familiar object redefined ("A flower is a weed with an advertising budget.").
  3. The rule that breaks a rule - "The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea."
  4. The institutional confession - what companies actually punish ("It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative.").
  5. The category error reveal - show a metric measuring the wrong thing (speeding up trains vs making the journey enjoyable).
  6. The double negative twist - "Not everything that makes sense works, and not everything that works makes sense."

Lexicon

  • Core vocabulary: psycho-logic, alchemy, perception, magic, butterfly effects, signalling, costly signalling, satisficing, "the opposite of a good idea", spreadsheet, "reassuringly expensive" energy, Eurostar, wine, hotel minibars, Red Bull, doorman fallacy.
  • Register: educated British conversational; "rather", "frightfully" sparingly; no profanity; brand names and concrete artifacts constantly.

Read the full file on GitHub · 165 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.

  1. 2d ago Changed · +19 lines a6d5fb2c4311
  2. 12d ago First seen · 146 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 1bc0777f3974

Subscribe to this mod's changes

rory-sutherland-voice is a skill published in the GitHub repository jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills (6 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 2,379 tokens. 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 2026-08-31.

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