reverse-outline

reverse-outline is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from petar-djukic/writing-skills. It costs 0 tokens per session (2,798 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A tool for reverse-outlining an article: mapping each paragraph and section to its role in the argument. It adds markers and ranks what would be lost if paragraphs were removed, but does not rewrite the prose.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to annotate an article’s structure, rank paragraphs for deletion, audit whether each section earns its place, and check for compression damage after revisions.
Why use it?
It makes repetition, weak structure, and damage caused by cutting or rewriting easier to spot. An article’s argument is the chain of claims and reasons that supports its conclusion.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: installed under .agents/ (shared by several agents).

Good fit Use it to annotate an article’s structure, rank paragraphs for deletion, audit whether each section earns its place, and check for compression damage after revisions.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/petar-djukic/writing-skills/reverse-outline
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.

Any agent
npx skills add petar-djukic/writing-skills --skill reverse-outline
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/petar-djukic/writing-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 reverse-outline

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/petar-djukic/writing-skills/reverse-outline/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/petar-djukic/writing-skills/reverse-outline)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/petar-djukic/writing-skills/reverse-outline"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/petar-djukic/writing-skills/reverse-outline/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for reverse-outline

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/petar-djukic/writing-skills/reverse-outline"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/petar-djukic/writing-skills/reverse-outline.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,798 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00000 $0.02798
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.01399
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00560
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00280

Measured 6d ago against content hash e3f6bf3303d3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

reverse-outline 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 6d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 3 executable files (scripts/rank.py, scripts/rst_markers.py, scripts/test_reverse_outline.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

.agents/skills/reverse-outline/SKILL.md · 255 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 255 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.


name: reverse-outline description: >- Decompose an article into its argument structure, persist that structure as HTML-comment markers in the text, and rank every paragraph and section by what the argument loses if it is cut. RST nuclearity at paragraph grain run as a reverse outline: one line per paragraph saying what it does for which other paragraph, then a deletion sheet ordered by distance from the point. Also re-checks each paragraph against its own marker after a rewrite pass, which is how compression damage becomes visible. Never rewrites prose. Triggers: reverse outline, decompose the argument, what can I cut, rank paragraphs, rst map, does this section earn its place, erosion check. argument-hint: 'Path to the markdown article, plus one of: annotate | rank | audit | strip'

reverse-outline

Answers one question the other instruments cannot: what does this section say that an earlier one did not?

Every existing tool works on a unit smaller than the problem. tighten-style tightens sentences. critic-panel nominates one paragraph per critic. The polemic blueprint budgets one structure in one form. AI-drafted text goes on at the section as readily as at the sentence, and nothing asks a section to justify its existence.

This skill labels the argument, then ranks by what deletion would cost. The author cuts from the bottom. No prose is written, at any point, which is why it can run after the terminal stage that forbids a generative pass.

Method

Three published pieces, one procedure.

  • Reverse outlining (writing-centre practice; the Waterloo handout) is the procedure: write one sentence per paragraph saying what it does, then read the sentences against the thesis and look for repetition, drift, and gaps. Done by hand it works and nobody does it, because it is tedious at article length and has to be redone after every revision.
  • Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann & Thompson 1988) is the labelling. Spans join in pairs: a nucleus the author's purpose depends on, and a satellite supporting it. The definitional test is deletion — remove a satellite and the text still makes its point; remove a nucleus and it does not. RST's relation set is closed and each relation states its intended effect on the reader, which is exactly the "why is this paragraph here" line a reverse outline asks for.
  • Marcu (1997) is the ranking: units ordered by nuclearity depth match what human summarizers keep. Read backwards, that is a deletion order.

Read the full file on GitHub · 255 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 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. 6d ago Changed · +3 lines e3f6bf3303d3
  2. 11d ago First seen · 252 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 1a52682192cb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

reverse-outline is a skill published in the GitHub repository petar-djukic/writing-skills (4 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 2,798 tokens. 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 2026-08-31.

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