writing-beats

writing-beats is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from MatthewYe/opencode-toolbox. It costs 78 tokens per session (644 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of writing-beats, MIT.

A step-by-step method for turning raw material into an article, one small section at a time. A “beat” is one move in the article, such as introducing an idea or changing direction.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assemble articles from notes or source material, select starting points, and plan the next section as you write.
Why use it?
It helps avoid writing the whole article at once and lets the writer choose how the story develops after each section.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the mattpocock-skills plugin — 29 skills shipped together

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/matthewye/opencode-toolbox/writing-beats
Any agent
npx skills add MatthewYe/opencode-toolbox --skill writing-beats
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/MatthewYe/opencode-toolbox

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install mattpocock-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 29 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/matthewye/opencode-toolbox/writing-beats.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/matthewye/opencode-toolbox/writing-beats)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/matthewye/opencode-toolbox/writing-beats"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/matthewye/opencode-toolbox/writing-beats.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" 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 644 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00078 $0.00644
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00322
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00129
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00064

Measured yesterday against content hash 0843367d0a65, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, 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 yesterday.

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

This is a copy

100% identical to writing-beats — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

upstream/skills/in-progress/writing-beats/SKILL.md · 53 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 53 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. Preview what beats that might lead to once written - as if the user is seeing a little way down the path.
  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, 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.

Writing one beat

Once a beat is picked, write that beat only to the article file. Do not write the next beat.

Pull material from the raw pile to populate the beat. You can paraphrase, split, recombine, or quote. The pile is a quarry.

Ending the journey

The article ends when the journey is complete — not when the pile is empty. Most piles will have leftover fragments that don't make it in. That is fine; that is the point of having more raw material than you need.

Read the full file on GitHub · 53 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. yesterday First seen · 53 lines · 78 tokens per session scan A 0843367d0a65

Subscribe to this mod's changes

writing-beats is a skill published in the GitHub repository MatthewYe/opencode-toolbox (5 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 78 tokens to every session and 644 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to writing-beats, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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