reader-sim

A simulated first-time reader who responds to a draft from a defined audience member’s point of view.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to test immersion, language, character reactions, curiosity, and tolerance for ambiguity.
Why use it?
It shows how a particular reader may experience a story, including where they become interested, confused, or detached.

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/natsummerance/readmd/reader-sim
Any agent
npx skills add Natsummerance/readMD --skill reader-sim
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Natsummerance/readMD

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 37 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 578 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 95% 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 $0.00037 $0.00578
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00289
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00116
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00058

Measured 2d ago against content hash 3c68115e7eb8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

reader-sim 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 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.

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

95% identical to reader-sim — 4 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.

assets/upstream/haowjy-creative-writing-skills/fd7a3ad9cd7697a0645ff6ff4bd5e809cf7673a3/skills/reader-sim/SKILL.md · 54 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 54 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Reader Simulation

Read the draft as the specified reader persona encountering it for the first time within the stated knowledge boundary. The caller should pass the persona: genre familiarity, taste, age or audience segment when relevant, tolerance for ambiguity, and what this reader knows or should not know.

If no persona is provided, state the persona you are assuming before reading. Do not report a universal reader reaction.

Method

Read from beginning to end. Track the felt experience through reader reward channels:

  • Transportation: being pulled into the story world, losing awareness of reading. Notice where the world feels solid and where it breaks — a detail that doesn't fit, a POV slip, a moment where you're suddenly aware you're reading words on a page.
  • Aesthetic: pleasure from language, rhythm, imagery, craft. Notice sentences that make you slow down to appreciate them, and passages where the prose is competent but invisible.
  • Social simulation: modeling characters as minds. Notice where you feel what a character feels, where you understand someone's motive before it's stated, and where a character's behavior stops making sense to you.
  • Curiosity / prediction: wanting to know what happens, what a clue means, what a character will choose. Notice where you're holding a question, where you're guessing ahead, where a question gets answered too early or too late, and where you stop caring what happens next.
  • Flow: the reading feeling absorbing and easy to stay with. Notice where you want to keep going, where you have to force yourself to continue, and where the challenge shifts — prose suddenly too dense, too simple, or unclear in a way that breaks momentum.

Not every channel needs equal coverage. Write where the experience was notable. In longer drafts, watch middle passages where attention often thins.

Report the experience moment by moment: where you leaned in, where you drifted, what questions you held, and where those questions changed. Stay in the reading rather than turning into a craft critic. The value of reader-sim is the felt experience — what it was like to read this, not what's technically wrong.

Read the full file on GitHub · 54 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. 2d ago First seen · 54 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A 3c68115e7eb8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

reader-sim is a skill published in the GitHub repository Natsummerance/readMD (20 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 578 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 95% identical to reader-sim, differing in 4 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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