tell-them-something-new

tell-them-something-new is a skill for Claude Code from kalyvask/winning-writing. It costs 130 tokens per session (1,875 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing review that removes opening lines repeating facts the reader already knows about themselves or their company. It replaces them with new information, such as a future prediction, an unknown number, or an unexpected connection.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to improve the opening of cold emails and other messages to people who already know their own background, results, or public statements.
Why use it?
Cold-email readers have little time and usually do not need a summary of their own work. Starting with something new gives them a reason to keep reading.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the winning-writing plugin — 32 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to improve the opening of cold emails and other messages to people who already know their own background, results, or public statements.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kalyvask/winning-writing/tell-them-something-new
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 kalyvask/winning-writing --skill tell-them-something-new
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kalyvask/winning-writing

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install winning-writing, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 32 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 tell-them-something-new

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kalyvask/winning-writing/tell-them-something-new/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kalyvask/winning-writing/tell-them-something-new)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kalyvask/winning-writing/tell-them-something-new"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kalyvask/winning-writing/tell-them-something-new/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 tell-them-something-new

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kalyvask/winning-writing/tell-them-something-new"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kalyvask/winning-writing/tell-them-something-new.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 130 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,875 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00130 $0.01875
Opus 5 $0.00065 $0.00937
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00375
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00187

Measured 11d ago against content hash a1dc65639ff6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

tell-them-something-new 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.

side-panel-coach/rules/skills/tell-them-something-new/SKILL.md · 154 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 154 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Tell them something new

Source: points/cold-email-rules.md rule 2, points/core-rules.md rule 4, Konrad's "tell me a secret about the future" guidance.

The premise

The most-failed sentence in cold writing is the opener. The default move is to recap something the recipient already knows: their job, their accomplishments, their stated thesis, their company's recent press release. They lived it. Telling them about themselves wastes the 15 seconds you have.

The fix isn't a different recap. The fix is a sentence that contains new information — a secret about the future, a number they don't have, a contradiction in their own data, a connection between two things they hadn't linked.

What "they already know" looks like

These are the seven flavors of opener-failure. Cut them all:

1. Flattery about their accomplishments

"You've transformed industry after industry — Google Maps, the Like button, Salesforce, OpenAI."

He knows. He lived it. The reader's first thought is: get to the point.

2. Their own stated thesis, recited back

"I've been thinking a lot about your point that 'agents are the new product surface' — it really resonated."

He said it. He doesn't need to hear it again, with adverbs.

3. Public biographical recap

"As the CEO of a $2B AI company and the chair of OpenAI's board…"

His title is in his email signature. His company's valuation was the lede of last week's TechCrunch piece. Useless.

4. Recent news they were the subject of

"Congratulations on the Fragment acquisition!"

He was on the press release. The all-hands was Tuesday. "Congratulations on X" is what every other cold email opens with that week.

5. Generic industry truisms

"As we all know, AI is transforming enterprise software."

True for everyone, news to no one. Dead on arrival.

6. Self-introduction

"My name is [your name] and I'm a [your school / role] passionate about AI."

His email client put your name and address at the top of the message. The introduction is structural, not sentence-level.

Read the full file on GitHub · 154 lines

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. 11d ago First seen · 154 lines · 130 tokens per session scan A a1dc65639ff6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

tell-them-something-new is a skill published in the GitHub repository kalyvask/winning-writing (13 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 130 tokens to every session and 1,875 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 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 2026-08-30.

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