show-your-work-kleon

show-your-work-kleon is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from simbajigege/book2skills. It costs 34 tokens per session (2,965 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A sharing framework based on Austin Kleon’s book Show Your Work! It treats sharing the process, influences, questions, and failures behind creative work as part of building an audience.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan posts about creative progress, document how work is made, build an audience, and participate in a creative community.
Why use it?
It helps creators decide what to share before a project is finished and connect with people through the work process.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to plan posts about creative progress, document how work is made, build an audience, and participate in a creative community.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/simbajigege/book2skills/show-your-work-kleon
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 simbajigege/book2skills --skill show-your-work-kleon
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/simbajigege/book2skills

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 show-your-work-kleon

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/simbajigege/book2skills/show-your-work-kleon/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/simbajigege/book2skills/show-your-work-kleon)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/simbajigege/book2skills/show-your-work-kleon"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/simbajigege/book2skills/show-your-work-kleon/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 show-your-work-kleon

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/simbajigege/book2skills/show-your-work-kleon"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/simbajigege/book2skills/show-your-work-kleon.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,965 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 pass 7 Sept 2026
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 $0.00034 $0.02965
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.01483
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00593
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00297

Measured 12d ago against content hash 1fa910d12532, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

show-your-work-kleon 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 12d 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.

skills/show-your-work-kleon/SKILL.md · 210 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 210 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Core Philosophy

Austin Kleon's Show Your Work! makes a single counterintuitive argument: you don't need talent, credentials, or a finished body of work before you start sharing. You need to share the process of becoming. The audience finds you not because of what you've produced, but because they recognize themselves in how you work.

The fundamental reframe: stop thinking "I need to finish this before I can share it." Start thinking "sharing IS the work."


When to Use This Skill

Use this skill for queries that match the trigger phrases in the description and require applying the decision framework from Show Your Work! rather than summarizing the book.

The Framework

Principle 1: Scenius Over Genius

Kleon borrows the term "scenius" from Brian Eno — the idea that creativity is not the product of lone geniuses but of collaborative ecology: a group of people in the same scene who share ideas, steal from each other generously, build on each other's work.

Why this matters for sharing: You are not a solo creator broadcasting to an audience. You are a node in a scenius. When you share your process, your influences, your failures, and your questions, you contribute to a creative ecosystem that is larger than any individual. The scenius rewards contributors.

Practical implication: Credit your influences publicly. Show what you're learning from. Make your "scenius" visible — the books you're reading, the artists inspiring you, the problems you're wrestling with.

Principle 2: The Amateur Advantage

"Amateur" comes from the Latin for "lover." An amateur does work for the love of it, not for money or credentials. Kleon argues the amateur has a structural advantage over the professional:

  • Less to lose by experimenting publicly
  • Willing to ask "dumb" questions that experts have forgotten to ask
  • Enthusiasm that is contagious (professionals often hide theirs)
  • Learning in public at full speed, which is itself compelling to watch

Read the full file on GitHub · 210 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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. 12d ago First seen · 210 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 1fa910d12532

Subscribe to this mod's changes

show-your-work-kleon is a skill published in the GitHub repository simbajigege/book2skills (163 stars, last pushed 17d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 2,965 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.