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.
npx agentmods add skills/rileyhilliard/claude-essentials/structuring-articlesnpx skills add rileyhilliard/claude-essentials --skill structuring-articlesgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rileyhilliard/claude-essentialsWhat 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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00051 | $0.01382 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00026 | $0.00691 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00010 | $0.00276 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00138 |
Grade A, and why
structuring-articles 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 3d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 96 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Structuring Articles
Professional journalists don't just write — they select a structure that serves their material. A trend piece about remote work demands a different architecture than a breaking news story about a policy change. This skill helps you match content to the right framework, then execute it.
How This Skill Relates to Other Skills
This skill handles structure — the bones of an article. It tells you what goes where and why.
For voice, tone, and anti-AI rhetoric, load the writer skill. These two skills are designed to work together: structure from here, style from there.
For executive/strategy documents (board decks, business cases, market analysis), the strategy-writer skill is more appropriate — those follow their own conventions.
Framework Selection
Match the content to a framework before writing. The decision depends on three things: what kind of story is it, what's the strongest material you have, and how much space do you have?
| You're writing about... | Strongest material | Framework | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|
| A systemic trend or issue, and you have a compelling person affected by it | A character whose experience illustrates the bigger picture | WSJ Formula | references/wsj-formula.md |
| Breaking news, a new report, or a policy announcement | The headline fact — what just happened and why it matters | Inverted Pyramid | references/inverted-pyramid.md |
| A news event that also needs narrative depth | Both the headline fact AND a rich chronological story behind it | Hourglass | references/hourglass.md |
| A sequential news event you want to narrate after the headline | The headline fact AND a chronological sequence of what happened | Martini Glass | references/martini-glass.md |
| A complex topic you want to ease readers into gradually | A specific person or scene AND broad research/data | Diamond | references/diamond.md |
| A major event and you want to reconstruct how it unfolded | Detailed sourcing on what happened when — timestamps, scenes, dialogue | Tick-Tock | references/tick-tock.md |
| A story with a dramatic climax moment | A gripping scene you can open with before rewinding | Nine Structure | references/nine-structure.md |
| Two parallel storylines that illuminate each other | Multiple characters or threads that intersect | Braided Narrative | references/braided-narrative.md |
| A data-driven story with a central human character | Both quantitative data AND a compelling personal story | Accordion | references/accordion.md |
| You're on deadline and need to organize material fast | A pile of notes, quotes, and facts that need ordering | Five Boxes | references/five-boxes.md |
What ships with it
11 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.
- references/accordion.md 2.9 KB
- references/braided-narrative.md 3.1 KB
- references/diamond.md 2.7 KB
- references/five-boxes.md 2.8 KB
- references/hourglass.md 2.7 KB
- references/inverted-pyramid.md 3.4 KB
- references/martini-glass.md 2.8 KB
- references/nine-structure.md 2.6 KB
- references/prose-craft.md 12 KB
- references/tick-tock.md 3.4 KB
- references/wsj-formula.md 4.7 KB
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.
- 3d ago First seen · 96 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A 5f6021435747
structuring-articles is a skill published in the GitHub repository rileyhilliard/claude-essentials (128 stars, last pushed 15d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 51 tokens to every session and 1,382 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 2026-08-30.
Other skills, from other repositories
systematic-debugging
Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.
brainstorming
You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior. Explores user intent, requirements and design before implementation.
auto-perf-optimize
Run agent-driven VS Code performance or memory investigations. Use when asked to launch Code OSS, automate a VS Code scenario, run the Chat memory smoke runner, capture renderer heap snapshots, take workflow screenshots, compare run summaries, or drive a repeatable scenario before heap-snapshot analysis.
chat-perf
Run chat perf benchmarks and memory leak checks against the local dev build or any published VS Code version. Use when investigating chat rendering regressions, validating perf-sensitive changes to chat UI, or checking for memory leaks in the chat response pipeline.
chat-pet-sprite-creation
Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.
cpu-profile-analysis
Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…