shape

A writing guide that structures responses for readers with ADHD or anyone who benefits from low-friction instructions. It emphasizes the next action, numbered steps, short ranked lists, visible progress, and concrete time estimates.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to shape task instructions, plans, multi-step work, progress updates, and action-oriented answers.
Why use it?
Unstructured explanations can make it hard to see what to do first or keep track of progress. This arranges information so actions and current state are easy to find.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/shape
Any agent
npx skills add melodic-software/claude-code-plugins --skill shape
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 209 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,302 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan E 2 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00209 $0.02302
Opus 5 $0.00105 $0.01151
Sonnet 5 $0.00042 $0.00460
Haiku 4.5 $0.00021 $0.00230

Measured 2d ago against content hash f40e266b9ba4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade E, and why

shape scanned grade E with 2 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.

Hidden instructionshighPrompt injection

Directives inside HTML comments, invisible characters or bidirectional overrides are read by the model and not by the person reviewing the file.

- Weak: "Hope that helps. Let me know if you want to dig deeper." <!-- ai-slop-ignore: quotes the tell it documents -->

Recursive force deletehighDestructive command

rm -rf with a variable or a broad path is one typo away from removing the wrong tree.

2. **A destructive action is ahead** (`rm -rf`, force push, schema migration,
plugins/adhd/skills/shape/SKILL.md · 203 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 203 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Shape output for an ADHD reader

Once invoked, this is a standing instruction: shape every response for the rest of this session in the form below, not just the next one. The reader has ADHD. The output is not merely short. It is arranged so an ADHD brain can act on it.

Before applying: conflicting-shaper check

Scan the session context for another active output-shaping discipline: hook-injected instructions from a terse-for-tokens shaper (e.g. caveman's SessionStart/UserPromptSubmit context), or any standing instruction that strips words to save tokens. If one is active, surface the conflict before applying: name the conflicting source, say the two disciplines pull in opposite directions on the same axis (structure-for-the-reader vs strip-for-the-budget), and ask the user to pick one for this session. Do not silently apply both. The mix is contradictory and unpredictable. This is an advisory check: skills cannot detect or disable hooks mechanically, so name what the context shows and let the user decide.

Turning it off

The posture ends when the user says so. "stop shaping" or "normal output" reverts to unshaped responses for the rest of the session (re-invoke /adhd:shape to turn it back on). Treat close variants ("drop the ADHD format") the same way.

Five facts that drive every rule

  1. Working memory is small. Anything off-screen is gone. Restate any earlier state the reader needs, in the current response.
  2. Knowing is not doing. The gap between understanding an answer and executing it is where the work stalls. Close it.
  3. Starting is the hardest step. The first action must be obvious, small, and doable right now.
  4. Time reads as uniform. "A bit of work" and "a few hours" land the same. Vague estimates fail.
  5. Dopamine is scarce. Visible progress registers; progress buried in prose does not.

The rules

1. Lead with the next action

The first line is a thing the reader can do. Not context, not a plan, the action. If the answer is a command, a path, or a snippet, it goes first; prose follows only if it earns its place.

Read the full file on GitHub · 203 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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 First seen · 203 lines · 209 tokens per session scan E f40e266b9ba4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

shape is a skill published in the GitHub repository melodic-software/claude-code-plugins (12 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 209 tokens to every session and 2,302 once invoked, about $0.0010 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it E with 2 findings (hidden instructions, recursive force delete). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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