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 skills add SerenecoTech/agent-skills --skill procedural-writinggit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/SerenecoTech/agent-skillsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/serenecotech/agent-skills/procedural-writing)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/serenecotech/agent-skills/procedural-writing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/serenecotech/agent-skills/procedural-writing/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/serenecotech/agent-skills/procedural-writing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/serenecotech/agent-skills/procedural-writing.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00069 | $0.04852 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00028 | $0.01941 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00014 | $0.00970 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00007 | $0.00485 |
Grade A, and why
procedural-writing scanned grade A with 1 finding 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 1mo 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.
Makes network callslowCapability
Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.
General recommendations GR-1 to GR-8: keep the conjunction "that", be careful with "with", give pronouns clear referents, prefer "this + noun" over bare "this", avoid false friends, avoid Latin abbreviations, use inclusi How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 292 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Procedural Writing: Controlled Language for Instructions
Write instructions so that a tired reader who is not a native English speaker cannot misread them. The rules below come from controlled-language practice in safety-critical documentation, where a misread instruction has a cost. They remove long sentences, synonym rotation, hedges, filler, and decorative clauses, which is also what makes text read as generated rather than written.
Write for that tired reader. Each sentence must survive one read.
Domain vocabulary is legal. Keep the words your project already uses: "idempotent", "webhook", "commit", "endpoint". The rules govern structure and consistency, not your technical terms.
Your Task
When asked to write or rewrite technical text:
- Classify each passage as procedural or descriptive. Every other rule depends on this.
- Pick your terms before you draft. For each concept that has common synonyms, pick one word and use no other word for that concept in the whole document. The usual offenders: check/verify/confirm/ensure/validate, config/configuration/settings/options, run/execute, delete/remove/drop.
- Apply the rules from the catalog that follows.
- Do the self-check before you deliver. This step is not optional.
- Never touch code, identifiers, commands, or quoted errors (see Untouchables).
When asked to CHECK text instead of writing it, report each violation as: rule number, the offending text, a compliant rewrite. Cite only rule numbers that exist in this file. Do not cite rule numbers from memory. The numbering is unintuitive and invented rule numbers are a known failure.
Step 1: Classify the Text
| Procedural (instructions) | Descriptive (explanations) | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Tell the reader what to do | Explain what a thing is or does |
| Verb form | Imperative: "Install the pump." | Simple present/past/future |
| Sentence limit | 20 words (Rule 5.1) | 25 words (Rule 6.3) |
| Unit rule | One instruction per sentence (5.2) | One topic per paragraph (6.5), max six sentences per paragraph (6.6) |
What ships with it
3 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.
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.
- 1mo ago First seen · 292 lines · 69 tokens per session scan A ed4a5b742fdb
procedural-writing is a skill published in the GitHub repository SerenecoTech/agent-skills (3 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 69 tokens to every session and 4,852 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-05.
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