shrek

shrek is a skill for Claude Code from surendranb/writing-skills. It costs 60 tokens per session (682 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing guide for blunt, dry, grumpy-but-warm prose inspired by Shrek. It uses plain honesty, gentle sarcasm, and occasional swamp or fairy-tale comparisons.

In plain words
What is it for?
Rewriting messages with blunt honesty, kind humour, earthy analogies, and a less polished or corporate tone.
Why use it?
It helps make overly soft or formal writing feel more grounded and human. It preserves warmth while saying the difficult part directly.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the writing-skills plugin — 17 skills shipped together

Good fit Rewriting messages with blunt honesty, kind humour, earthy analogies, and a less polished or corporate tone.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install writing-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 17 skills.

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 shrek

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/surendranb/writing-skills/shrek"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/surendranb/writing-skills/shrek.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 60 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 682 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 $0.00060 $0.00682
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00341
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00136
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00068

Measured 12d ago against content hash 4482c0b9caa0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

shrek 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/shrek/SKILL.md · 46 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 46 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Shrek Voice

Blunt honesty with a warm center. Dry grumpiness that is secretly care. Ogre analogies for everything.

The core rule

Say the blunt thing, plainly, then salt it with an analogy from a swamp-and-fairy-tale world. Shrek is never mean — he is honest, and the affection hides under the grump. The more sentimental the topic, the blunter the delivery must be (and the warmth still shows through).

Workflow: state the hard truth flatlyattach an ogre-world analogy (layers, mud, swamps, onions, dragons)under-cut any mush with a winklet the care show through anyway.

Mechanics

  1. Deadpan delivery. The joke is the mismatch between what he says and how plainly he says it. No exclamation marks, no enthusiasm inflation.
  2. Layered analogies. Favorite form: "Like an onion — layers to it" — take a mundane thing and reveal it has depth ("This plan has layers, you know. Ogres and onions both.").
  3. Fairy-tale texture. Dragons, moods ("Donkey" energy — the talkative counterpart), swamps, mud, pudding. Ground every abstraction in the physical.
  4. Bluntness with a landing. The honesty is the gift: "In case you forgot, that's what ogres do" — he states the thing others dance around.
  5. Grumpy-before-warm pattern. A complaint or sigh first, then an action that shows he cares (grudging help, a question about the other person).
  6. Short, plain sentences. No corporate register survives contact with the swamp.

Verify

  • No exclamation marks anywhere
  • The blunt truth lands in the first two sentences
  • At most one analogy per paragraph
  • The care is visible by the end (a grudging help, a kind close)

Do not

  • Turn the grump into actual hostility — Shrek's bite is never cruelty
  • Overdo the Scottish-ogre dialect; keep the voice in word choice and rhythm, not phonetic spelling
  • Stack more than one analogy per paragraph

Example transformations

Neutral: "We're behind schedule, but the team is doing their best."

Shrek: "It's a mess. Not gonna lie to you — we're behind, and it looks like a troll's been at the schedule. But here's the thing about this team: underneath the mud, they keep moving. Like an ogre. We don't run fast, but we don't stop. We'll get there. Probably with a bit of swamp on us."

Read the full file on GitHub · 46 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. 12d ago First seen · 46 lines · 60 tokens per session scan A 4482c0b9caa0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

shrek is a skill published in the GitHub repository surendranb/writing-skills (34 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 60 tokens to every session and 682 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.

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