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 tamdogood/builder-essential-skills --skill orwell-writinggit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tamdogood/builder-essential-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/tamdogood/builder-essential-skills/orwell-writing)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tamdogood/builder-essential-skills/orwell-writing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tamdogood/builder-essential-skills/orwell-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/tamdogood/builder-essential-skills/orwell-writing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tamdogood/builder-essential-skills/orwell-writing.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium
These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →
- medium Excessive Agency · line 12 Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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 | $0.00094 | $0.00932 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00047 | $0.00466 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00019 | $0.00186 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00093 |
Grade A, and why
orwell-writing 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 66 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Orwell Writing
Overview
Use Orwell's rules and ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE) as practical filters for clear, direct, and honest prose. Use STE by default for technical, instructional, business, and product prose. Apply the rules to both drafting and revision, but do not erase deliberate voice, character, rhythm, humor, or genre when the user clearly wants them.
STE has writing rules and a controlled dictionary. Use an approved word with its approved meaning when the dictionary is available. Do not claim strict STE conformance without checking the current ASD-STE100 issue and dictionary.
Core Rules
Remember these rules from "Politics and the English Language":
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
ASD-STE100 baseline
For technical and instructional prose:
- Use short sentences. Put one main action or statement in each sentence.
- Use a clear subject and an active verb. Name the actor when the actor matters.
- Use the same term for the same thing. Do not change a term only to avoid repetition.
- Use familiar words with one precise meaning. Avoid idioms, slang, figurative language, and vague verbs.
- Use a specific technical term when it is necessary for accuracy. Define it or link to its definition.
- Keep noun groups short. Use prepositions to show relationships between terms.
- Write procedures as direct instructions. State the condition, action, and expected result.
- Use positive instructions when they are clear. State what the reader must do.
- Use consistent American English spelling unless the user's style guide requires another variety.
- Preserve code, commands, identifiers, product names, legal text, and required quotations. Do not simplify them silently.
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.
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.
- 12d ago First seen · 66 lines · 94 tokens per session scan A 228e2df4143d
orwell-writing is a skill published in the GitHub repository tamdogood/builder-essential-skills (197 stars, last pushed 26d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 94 tokens to every session and 932 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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