writing-beats

writing-beats is a skill for Claude Code from karlarao/afk. It costs 78 tokens per session (1,214 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided writing process that turns notes or source material into an article one section at a time. Each section, called a beat, advances the piece before you choose where it goes next.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to choose an opening, write the article in small stages, and decide whether the next part should be a paragraph, list, table, or other format.
Why use it?
It prevents a large pile of notes from becoming an unfocused draft and keeps the article's direction under your control.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the mattpocock-skills plugin — 13 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to choose an opening, write the article in small stages, and decide whether the next part should be a paragraph, list, table, or other format.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/karlarao/afk/writing-beats
View source ↗ karlarao/afk
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 karlarao/afk --skill writing-beats
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/karlarao/afk

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install mattpocock-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 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 writing-beats

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/karlarao/afk/writing-beats"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/karlarao/afk/writing-beats.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 78 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,214 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 $0.00078 $0.01214
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00607
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00243
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00121

Measured 10d ago against content hash bd38e3124b01, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

writing-beats 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 10d 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

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

skills/matt-latest/skills/in-progress/writing-beats/SKILL.md · 102 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 102 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

The user has passed (or will pass) a markdown file of raw material.

If the user did not say where to save the article, ask once and remember the path.

Then run a beat-by-beat journey:

  1. Write 2–3 candidate starting beats, drawn from the raw material. Each is a different entry point into the article. Show the user the beats before writing it to the article file. The user picks one.
  2. Once the user picks a starting beat, write only that beat to the article file. A beat may be one sentence or several paragraphs — whatever that beat naturally is. Stop there.
  3. Re-read the article file from disk. Then offer 2–3 candidate next beats — different directions the journey could pivot to from where the article now stands.
  4. Loop steps 2–4 until the article reaches a natural end.

What is a beat

A beat is one move in the journey. It does one thing — sets a scene, lands a point, asks a question, tells a small story, drops an aside, twists the angle. Then it stops, leaving the reader at a place where the next beat can pivot.

A beat is sized by what it needs:

  • A single sentence if that's all the move is ("And then nothing happened for three weeks.").
  • A short paragraph if the move needs setup.
  • Multiple paragraphs if the beat is a self-contained vignette, argument, or example.

If a "beat" needs five paragraphs and three subheadings, it's not a beat — it's two beats glued together. Split it.

Offering candidate beats

Each candidate should be genuinely different — different angle, different tone, different move. Not three flavours of the same paragraph. The user is choosing a direction, so the choices need to diverge.

Format the offer like a menu:

Where do you want to start?

1. **Open with the failure.** Drop the reader into the moment it broke —
   the bug, the silence, the wrong number on the dashboard. Hooks on shock.

2. **Open with the contradiction.** State the thing everyone believes,
   then state the thing that turns out to be true. Hooks on curiosity.

3. **Open with the small scene.** A specific morning, a specific
   conversation. Hooks on intimacy.

Read the full file on GitHub · 102 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. 10d ago First seen · 102 lines · 78 tokens per session scan A bd38e3124b01

Subscribe to this mod's changes

writing-beats is a skill published in the GitHub repository karlarao/afk (2 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 78 tokens to every session and 1,214 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-31.

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