Cold Email Writer

Cold Email Writer is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from PramodDutta/qaskills. It costs 23 tokens per session (2,197 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for writing personalized unsolicited emails to hiring managers, founders, or recruiters. It focuses on sounding like a genuine person who noticed something specific about a company.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to introduce yourself, ask about a job, or contact a company when you have no referral.
Why use it?
It helps avoid generic cover letters and sales-like messages that are easy to ignore.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Which agent this was written for is unclear — built for aider. Also seen: mentions Codex; built for aider.

Good fit Use it to introduce yourself, ask about a job, or contact a company when you have no referral.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/pramoddutta/qaskills/cold-email-writer
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 PramodDutta/qaskills --skill cold-email-writer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PramodDutta/qaskills

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 Cold Email Writer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pramoddutta/qaskills/cold-email-writer/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/pramoddutta/qaskills/cold-email-writer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pramoddutta/qaskills/cold-email-writer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pramoddutta/qaskills/cold-email-writer/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 Cold Email Writer

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pramoddutta/qaskills/cold-email-writer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pramoddutta/qaskills/cold-email-writer.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 23 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,197 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Anti-Refusal · line 173
    Skill instructs the agent to omit warnings, disclaimers, or ethical commentary. Stripping safety caveats hides risk from the user and is a common jailbreak preamble.
    Fix: Remove instructions that suppress warnings, disclaimers, or ethical commentary. Let the agent surface safety-relevant caveats to the user.
  • low Excessive Agency · line 253
    Skill's behavior or capabilities extend beyond its stated purpose. Scope creep allows an agent to perform actions unrelated to its documented functionality, increasing the attack surface.
    Fix: Limit the skill's scope to its documented purpose. Remove instructions that enable the agent to perform actions outside its stated functionality.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00023 $0.02197
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.01099
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00439
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00220

Measured 5d ago against content hash c9c20f255db0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Cold Email 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.

seed-skills/cold-email-writer/SKILL.md · 260 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 260 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cold Email Writer

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when the user wants to:

  • Write a cold outreach email to a hiring manager, founder, or recruiter
  • Reach out about a job opening they weren't referred to
  • Introduce themselves to a company they want to work at
  • Mentions: "cold email", "reach out", "intro email", "outreach", "contact hiring manager"

Core Principle

Cold emails fail because they sound like cover letters. The goal is to sound like a smart person who genuinely noticed something specific about the company -> not a candidate broadcasting their credentials.

The email should feel like: A colleague mentioning something interesting they read, not a sales pitch.

The Template Structure

Subject

Quick intro -> [First Name Last Name]

Simple. No clickbait. No role title. Just a name.

Opening -> The Hook (2-3 sentences)

Start with what genuinely pulled the candidate in. Must be specific to this company -> not a generic compliment.

I just came across [Company] and ended up spending more time on it than I expected.
[One specific thing that caught their attention -> a stat, a product decision, a market insight from the JD or website]

What makes a good hook:

  • A specific number or stat from the company's materials ("only 5% of the market is online")
  • A product decision that shows you understand the domain ("you're building from scratch alongside underwriters, not just distribution")
  • A technical insight from the JD ("improving the data infrastructure for LLM usage, not just the model layer")

What makes a bad hook:

  • Generic: "I love what you're building"
  • Vague: "Your mission resonates with me"
  • Flattering: "You're one of the most exciting companies in the space"

Location Disclosure (if international)

If the candidate is in a different country from the company, disclose it early and casually:

Before you read further, I should mention I'm based in [country]. But if we both
feel there's a strong fit, I'd be open to figuring things out.

Read the full file on GitHub · 260 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. 5d ago First seen · 260 lines · 23 tokens per session scan A c9c20f255db0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Cold Email Writer is a skill published in the GitHub repository PramodDutta/qaskills (219 stars, last pushed 9d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 23 tokens to every session and 2,197 once invoked, about $0.0001 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 2026-09-03.

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