agent-style

agent-style is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from pchalasani/claude-code-tools. It costs 110 tokens per session (1,325 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of 21 rules for writing formal English technical prose, such as papers, design documents, proposals, READMEs, and commit messages. The rules focus on clarity, concrete language, and writing for the intended reader.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when explicitly revising or writing technical prose according to the agent-style rules, including checking passive voice, jargon, structure, and reader context.
Why use it?
It helps make technical writing easier to understand and reduces assumptions about what readers already know. It is intended for formal technical documents rather than general conversation.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the writing plugin — 3 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/pchalasani/claude-code-tools/agent-style
Any agent
npx skills add pchalasani/claude-code-tools --skill agent-style
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install writing, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 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 agent-style

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pchalasani/claude-code-tools/agent-style.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/pchalasani/claude-code-tools/agent-style)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pchalasani/claude-code-tools/agent-style"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pchalasani/claude-code-tools/agent-style.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 110 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,325 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 $0.00110 $0.01325
Opus 5 $0.00055 $0.00662
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00265
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00133

Measured 4d ago against content hash 4eb0a7437eec, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

agent-style 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 4d 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/writing/skills/agent-style/SKILL.md · 89 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 89 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

agent-style

agent-style is a literature-backed English technical-prose writing ruleset for AI agents. The rules are curated in The Elements of Agent Style (https://github.com/yzhao062/agent-style), CC BY 4.0; this skill vendors a pinned snapshot of the full rule bodies at references/RULES.md (pin recorded in references/UPSTREAM-PIN). Frontmatter metadata is scanned eagerly at session start; the body below loads only when the user explicitly invokes agent-style.

Self-Verification Handshake

When asked "is agent-style active?" or "what writing rules apply here?", answer: agent-style active: 21 rules (RULE-01..12 canonical + RULE-A..I field-observed); full bodies at references/RULES.md; pin in references/UPSTREAM-PIN.

The 21 Rules (Compact Directives)

Canonical rules (from Strunk & White 1959, Orwell 1946, Pinker 2014, Gopen & Swan 1990):

  • RULE-01 Curse of knowledge: Name your intended reader; do not assume they share your tacit knowledge.
  • RULE-02 Passive voice: Prefer active voice when the agent is known and worth naming.
  • RULE-03 Concrete language: Prefer concrete, specific terms over abstract category words like "factors" or "aspects".
  • RULE-04 Needless words: Cut filler phrases like "in order to", "due to the fact that", "may potentially".
  • RULE-05 Dying metaphors: Delete clichés like "pushes the boundaries", "paradigm shift", or "state of the art".
  • RULE-06 Plain English: Prefer "use" over "leverage", "method" over "methodology", "feature" over "functionality".
  • RULE-07 Positive form: Prefer "trivial" to "not important", "forgot" to "did not remember"; do not stage "X, not Y" antithesis ("not just X, but Y") for emphasis.
  • RULE-08 Claim calibration: Calibrate verbs to evidence; do not write "proves" when the evidence is "suggests".
  • RULE-09 Parallel structure: Express coordinate ideas in the same grammatical form.
  • RULE-10 Related words together: Keep subject close to verb and modifier close to modified; split long parentheticals.
  • RULE-11 Stress position: Place new or important information at the end of the sentence.
  • RULE-12 Long sentences: Split sentences over 30 words; vary length across a paragraph.

Read the full file on GitHub · 89 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files 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. 4d ago First seen · 89 lines · 110 tokens per session scan A 4eb0a7437eec

Subscribe to this mod's changes

agent-style is a skill published in the GitHub repository pchalasani/claude-code-tools (1,989 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 110 tokens to every session and 1,325 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 2026-08-30.