textbook-methodology

textbook-methodology is a skill for Claude Code from queelius/claude-anvil. It costs 57 tokens per session (914 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing method for planning and drafting technical non-fiction books. It uses a structured workflow for ordering chapters, postponing detailed explanations, tracking ideas across the book, and working within page limits.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan book parts and chapters, decide when to introduce foundational material, defer topics to later sections, track recurring ideas, set page budgets, and organize drafting work.
Why use it?
It helps authors build long technical books in a manageable order while keeping early explanations connected to later sections. It also prevents promised follow-up material from being forgotten.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Part of the bookwright plugin — 3 skills, 11 commands, 11 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it to plan book parts and chapters, decide when to introduce foundational material, defer topics to later sections, track recurring ideas, set page budgets, and organize drafting work.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/queelius/claude-anvil/textbook-methodology
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 queelius/claude-anvil --skill textbook-methodology
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/queelius/claude-anvil

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install bookwright, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills, 11 commands, 11 agents, 1 hook.

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 textbook-methodology

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/queelius/claude-anvil/textbook-methodology.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/queelius/claude-anvil/textbook-methodology)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/queelius/claude-anvil/textbook-methodology"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/queelius/claude-anvil/textbook-methodology.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 57 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 914 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 $0.00057 $0.00914
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00457
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00183
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00091

Measured 8d ago against content hash 8188a9455775, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

textbook-methodology 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 8d 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.

bookwright/skills/textbook-methodology/SKILL.md · 72 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 72 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Textbook Methodology (bookwright)

The Bernoulli-textbook approach: discipline that makes long-form technical books actually finishable.

Atom-outward design

When designing a Part, sequence the chapters so the FOUNDATION chapter is drafted LAST. The Bernoulli textbook drafted chapter 1 (the noisy bit, the foundational atom) after chapters 2, 3, 4, because chapter 1 is best written knowing where the reader is being taken. The same pattern applies at the Part level: the part introduction chapter benefits from being drafted after the technical chapters it introduces.

Deferral discipline

Earlier chapters often need to mention a topic that gets full treatment later. Use the "we'll address this in §X" pattern: name the deferral explicitly, cite the section that will retire it, and make sure the integration check verifies that the target section actually does.

Examples from the Bernoulli textbook:

  • Chapter 1 §1.4 said "the full treatment of estimation lives in chapter 7." Chapter 7 §7.1 explicitly says it retires this deferral, and §7.2-7.3 cash in.
  • Chapter 1 exercise 10 said "what would a non-noisy-bit look like? See chapter 16." Chapter 16 §16.1 lists this as one of the deferrals it cashes.

Running threads

The master spec names 3-5 running threads (recurring concepts/examples that appear across chapters). Each chapter carries N of M threads. The integration check verifies each thread appears in the chapters the spec assigned it to.

Bernoulli threads: BSC (binary symmetric channel), biased coin, classifier verdict, Bloom filter, Miller-Rabin, Bernoulli[T] type. Each carries through multiple chapters; the integration check produces an inventory.

Page budgets

Per-section page targets are stated in the per-chapter plan. Plans 1-3 of Bernoulli came in 30-43% over target; Plans 4+ adjusted by aiming for the LOWER end of the target band to land near nominal. Tolerance: plus-or-minus 30 percent is the integration-check band.

If a section comes in significantly over, reviewers should ask: is the math density justifying it (acceptable), or is the prose padded (cut)?

Read the full file on GitHub · 72 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. 8d ago First seen · 72 lines · 57 tokens per session scan A 8188a9455775

Subscribe to this mod's changes

textbook-methodology is a skill published in the GitHub repository queelius/claude-anvil (2 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 57 tokens to every session and 914 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 2026-08-31.

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