writing-skills

writing-skills is a skill for Claude Code from slowdini/slow-powers. It costs 34 tokens per session (3,802 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for creating or auditing skills: reusable instructions that teach a coding agent how to handle a particular kind of work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when drafting a new skill or revising an existing one before measuring whether it changes the agent’s behavior.
Why use it?
It gives skill authors a consistent structure and checks whether their instructions are clear, correctly triggered, and worth testing.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions subagents; names the TodoWrite tool.

Part of the slow-powers plugin — 9 skills, 2 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it when drafting a new skill or revising an existing one before measuring whether it changes the agent’s behavior.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/slowdini/slow-powers/writing-skills
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 slowdini/slow-powers --skill writing-skills
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/slowdini/slow-powers

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install slow-powers, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 9 skills, 2 hooks.

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 writing-skills

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/slowdini/slow-powers/writing-skills/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/slowdini/slow-powers/writing-skills)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/slowdini/slow-powers/writing-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/slowdini/slow-powers/writing-skills/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 writing-skills

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/slowdini/slow-powers/writing-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/slowdini/slow-powers/writing-skills.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 3,802 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 $0.00034 $0.03802
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.01901
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00760
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00380

Measured 10d ago against content hash 1f6d1418349d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

writing-skills 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 10d 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/writing-skills/SKILL.md · 310 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 310 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Writing skills

Overview

Skill development has two phases: drafting (this skill) and evaluation (slow-powers:evaluating-skills). This skill is your template for authoring a new skill and your checklist for auditing an existing one — it covers structure, building blocks, description writing, and rationalization-proofing.

A behavioral draft you didn't measure is a claim you didn't verify. After drafting, hand off to slow-powers:evaluating-skills to decide whether the change is behavior-shaping (measure it) or deterministic instruction-following (declare the decision and reasoning, then skip). Default to measuring; the skip is a narrow, announced exception, not an escape hatch.

Validation checklist

Use your persistent task tracker — one task per item. Works for authoring a new skill or auditing an existing one — copy it into your tracker before you start, then work through the rest of this skill against it.

Draft:

  • Name uses only lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens
  • Frontmatter has name and description (under 1024 chars total)
  • Description starts with "Use when…", is third person, includes triggers/symptoms, and contains NO workflow summary
  • Body keeps to one excellent example per concept; no narrative-of-one-session content
  • Companion files use the correct directory from "Skill directory layout"; principles stay inline
  • Flowcharts only for non-obvious decisions/loops/branches; semantic labels, no code
  • Any checklist sits near the top of the body, before the procedural sections it gates
  • Body is lean (≤200 lines preferred, 500 max)

Validate (handoff to slow-powers:evaluating-skills):

  • Decide whether the change is behavior-shaping or deterministic, and announce the decision and reasoning (see "Choosing to test with evals"). Default to behavior-shaping when unsure.
  • If behavior-shaping (or the user opts in): author evals/evals.json with 2–3 realistic prompts
  • For discipline-enforcing skills, write pressure prompts combining multiple pressures, plus at least one seeded case (embeds a prior transcript) alongside a cold contrast case
  • Run the eval. Iterate until the with-skill pass rate is materially higher than baseline.

Read the full file on GitHub · 310 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 10d ago First seen · 310 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 1f6d1418349d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

writing-skills is a skill published in the GitHub repository slowdini/slow-powers (2 stars, last pushed 27d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 3,802 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 2026-08-31.

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