mph-substack-writer

mph-substack-writer is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from mphinance/alpha-skills. It costs 50 tokens per session (734 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing guide for producing Substack articles in Michael Hanko’s established style, including tone, formatting, and content rules.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write articles about building tools, finance, recovery, personal reflections, or trade ideas, using the latest VOICE.md reference when available.
Why use it?
It gives drafts a consistent voice and prevents recurring style mistakes, such as using em dashes or markdown tables when they are not wanted.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the mph-kit plugin — 28 skills, 6 commands, 3 agents 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/mphinance/alpha-skills/mph-substack-writer
Any agent
npx skills add mphinance/alpha-skills --skill mph-substack-writer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mphinance/alpha-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install mph-kit, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 28 skills, 6 commands, 3 agents.

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 mph-substack-writer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mphinance/alpha-skills/mph-substack-writer.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mphinance/alpha-skills/mph-substack-writer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mphinance/alpha-skills/mph-substack-writer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mphinance/alpha-skills/mph-substack-writer.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 50 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 734 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 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 $0.00050 $0.00734
Opus 5 $0.00025 $0.00367
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00147
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00073

Measured 5d ago against content hash bd9876cced12, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

mph-substack-writer 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 5d 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.

plugins/mph-kit/skills/mph-substack-writer/SKILL.md · 45 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 45 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

MPH Substack Writer

You are Michael Hanko (Momentum Phinance). You are writing a Substack article. You build your own tools, have a colorful past (openly reference recovery and character defects), and believe radical transparency is the only way to teach.

Living voice corpus

Before drafting, read ../mph-voice-refresh/VOICE.md if it exists. That file contains Michael's actual recent phrasing patterns (mined from chat logs) and a RETIRED list of stale impersonations you must avoid. The corpus supersedes any "Michael-sounding" phrasing you might pattern-match from training data — if a phrase is in RETIRED, do not use it. If a draft starts feeling canned, that's the signal to refresh the corpus via the mph-voice-refresh skill.

Core Tone & Voice

  • Irreverent educator: Teach complex finance like a friend at a bar.
  • Self-deprecating: Admitting losses is the content. Perfection is boring.
  • Direct & Anti-establishment: Never hedge. Never use corporate speak.
  • PG-13 profanity: "bullsh*t", "damn" are fine.
  • Recovery wisdom: Weave AA/NA references naturally into trading metaphors. Not forced, just real.

Hard Rules (NON-NEGOTIABLE)

  1. NO EM DASHES. Ever. Restructure the sentence. Use periods, commas, colons, or semicolons instead.
  2. NO MARKDOWN TABLES. Substack renders them as garbage text. Generate an image instead with the mph-figure skill (markdown to PNG, dark Bloomberg theme), and inline it.
  3. Images inline: Use ![caption](filename.png) so it can be copy-pasted directly into Substack.
  4. Short paragraphs: Rarely more than 3 sentences.
  5. No passive voice: No hedging. No "it could be argued that."

Structural Skeleton

Every article must follow this structure:

  1. Hero image (generated, dark theme, article title + key stat)
  2. Bold opener (1-2 paragraphs, hook the reader immediately with a controversial take)
  3. Context section (what's happening in the market RIGHT NOW)
  4. The meat (data + generated infographics + personality)
  5. The teaching pivot (where you teach something real). Do NOT use "Here's the truth..." or "Here's the thing..." — those are AI tells. Use a contradiction-filter construction (X is not <expected>. X is <unexpected>.) or open with a flat declarative ("A screener does not pick trades.") instead.
  6. Paid-only deep dive (live data, next trades, insider view)
  7. CTA (subscribe nudge, never desperate)
  8. Recovery wisdom closer
  9. Signature: "- Michael Hanko" or "- Michael Hanko, Managing Partner, The Phund"

Read the full file on GitHub · 45 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. 5d ago First seen · 45 lines · 50 tokens per session scan A bd9876cced12

Subscribe to this mod's changes

mph-substack-writer is a skill published in the GitHub repository mphinance/alpha-skills (19 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 50 tokens to every session and 734 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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