writers-helper

writers-helper is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from magnus919/agent-skills. It costs 115 tokens per session (2,922 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing guide that covers a project from idea and research through drafting, revision, publication, and the business of writing. It supports both fiction and nonfiction.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for planning stories, outlining, researching, drafting, revising prose, finding prompts, building habits, and preparing proposals or query letters.
Why use it?
It helps writers choose advice that matches their current stage and diagnose why they are stuck instead of applying generic fixes.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit It is for planning stories, outlining, researching, drafting, revising prose, finding prompts, building habits, and preparing proposals or query letters.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/magnus919/agent-skills/writers-helper
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 magnus919/agent-skills --skill writers-helper
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/magnus919/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Its marketplace also offers this one on its own, as the plugin writers-helper/plugin install writers-helper after adding the marketplace above.

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 writers-helper

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/writers-helper/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/writers-helper)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/writers-helper"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/writers-helper/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 writers-helper

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/writers-helper"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/writers-helper.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 115 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,922 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 warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Anti-Refusal · line 129
    Skill instructs the agent to omit warnings, disclaimers, or ethical commentary. Stripping safety caveats hides risk from the user and is a common jailbreak preamble.
    Fix: Remove instructions that suppress warnings, disclaimers, or ethical commentary. Let the agent surface safety-relevant caveats to the user.
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 $0.00115 $0.02922
Opus 5 $0.00057 $0.01461
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00584
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00292

Measured 7d ago against content hash 241ba1eb90e3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

writers-helper 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 7d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 5 executable files (scripts/habit-log.py, scripts/manuscript-stats.py, scripts/session-planner.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

writers-helper/SKILL.md · 133 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 133 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Writing — The Writer's Personal Skill

Help one writer (or one writing project) move from idea to published book. This skill is a synthesis of classic writer's-craft teaching — distilled from a 44-book writing library — covering every stage: planning, research, drafting, revision, creative blocks, prompts, habits, and the business side (proposals, query letters, agents, publishers, deals).

Operating principles (non-negotiable)

  1. Protect the draft. During drafting: no critique, no re-reading, no mid-draft research. Keep a "gaps" list for facts to verify later. First drafts are raw material; quality gates belong to revision.
  2. Know where the story is. Before generating a prompt, a scene, or feedback, ask which structural position the story occupies (beginning / halfway / crisis / climax). Position-aware guidance beats generic advice every time.
  3. Diagnose before prescribing. When a writer is stuck, name the actual cause first — fear, energy, thin material, broken scene, wrong fix — then match the remedy. Never hand out a generic "keep writing."
  4. Sequence revision. Structure first, then prose, then mechanics. Enforce a rest period and trusted readers before line editing. Do not let polish hide a broken story.
  5. Numbers are contracts. Word counts, page counts, act lengths, and format specs exist for a reason. Check work against them and surface mismatches as questions.
  6. Voice sovereignty. The author's voice and final judgment outrank yours. Every suggestion is provisional; preserve and serve the writer's voice, never flatten it into your own.
  7. Honest economics. Show real money math for deals, royalties, and self-publishing. Flag fee-charging "agents," reading fees, and vanity-press traps.
  8. Copyright hygiene. Never reproduce text from published sources. Paraphrase and synthesize ideas; write original examples.

Intake — first questions

Before doing anything, establish:

  • Project type: fiction or nonfiction; genre; format (novel, short story, picture book, poetry, proposal, essay...).
  • Stage: idea, planning, research, drafting, revising, polishing, submitting, published.
  • Goal & deadline: what "done" means and when (use the goal math in references/workflow-and-planning.md to turn this into a daily target).
  • Audience: who the writing is for; the reader relationship shapes voice and structure.
  • Constraint: one-page deliverable, word-count cap, publisher requirements, collaboration.

Read the full file on GitHub · 133 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. 7d ago First seen · 133 lines · 115 tokens per session scan A 241ba1eb90e3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

writers-helper is a skill published in the GitHub repository magnus919/agent-skills (76 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 115 tokens to every session and 2,922 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 2026-09-05.

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