newsletter-writer

newsletter-writer is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from travsteward/openwriter. It costs 118 tokens per session (8,078 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for producing a recurring email newsletter, from outlining and gathering material to interviewing the author, drafting, reviewing, and sending. It is designed for newsletters that explain the thinking behind the week’s work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to scaffold newsletter documents, collect source material, ask the author questions, combine the answers into a draft, and prepare the issue for review and sending.
Why use it?
It turns a regular newsletter into a repeatable process instead of a blank-page writing task. It also helps preserve the author’s voice and include reasoning that may not fit in short posts.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Good fit Use it to scaffold newsletter documents, collect source material, ask the author questions, combine the answers into a draft, and prepare the issue for review and sending.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/travsteward/openwriter/newsletter-writer
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 travsteward/openwriter --skill newsletter-writer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/travsteward/openwriter

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 newsletter-writer

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/travsteward/openwriter/newsletter-writer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/travsteward/openwriter/newsletter-writer.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 118 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 8,078 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. 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 $0.00118 $0.08078
Opus 5 $0.00059 $0.04039
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.01616
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00808

Measured 12d ago against content hash 03b6141e549d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

newsletter-writer 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 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl -sL "{image_url}" -o ~/.openwriter/profiles/Default/_images/{descriptive-name}.jpg
skills/newsletter-writer/SKILL.md · 618 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 618 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Newsletter Writer Skill — /newsletter-writer

Weekly newsletter pipeline: scaffold structure, gather data, query the author, synthesize in their voice, review, send.

Worked example throughout: a fictional newsletter, The Sleep Brief, written by a popular-science sleep author whose community site is deeprest.example.com and whose X handle is @sleepauthor. Substitute your own newsletter name, brand, domain, and handle — they live in your project's config.md (see Configuration).

Philosophy

This newsletter is behind the scenes, not a content recap. Readers can go read the tweets and articles themselves. The newsletter gives them what they can't get anywhere else: WHY the author wrote it, what they were trying to achieve, the deeper reasoning that didn't fit in 280 characters, and how the author's project interacted with the world that week. Every section answers "what was I thinking?" not "what did I post."

Commands

  • /newsletter or /newsletter draft — Full pipeline: scaffold → gather → query → enhanced scaffold → draft → review
  • /newsletter scaffold — Create doc with empty skeleton structure (header, HRs, placeholder sections, footer)
  • /newsletter gather — Data collection only (metrics, top tweets, article)
  • /newsletter review — Pre-send checklist + /polish 90/100 scoring on every section
  • /newsletter send — Send via OpenWriter newsletter system
  • /newsletter status — Subscriber count, last sent, domain status

Critical Rules

  1. ALWAYS use the authors-voice protocol. Load the voice profile/anchor, pull writing samples from the corpus, write with the profile as behavioral constraints, run anti-AI detection. Never skip this. The authors-voice skill ships with the OpenWriter authors-voice plugin.
  2. NEVER write the author's position for them. You gather data and present structure. You ASK the author what they think. They tell you. You synthesize their input in their voice. The author's original thinking is the product — you are the editor, not the writer.
  3. Source article content from OpenWriter docs FIRST. X Articles may not be readable via fxtwitter. The drafts live in OpenWriter. Search list_documents before trying external APIs.
  4. Every section headline is specific to that week's content. No generic recurring labels like "This Week on X" or "The Author's Position." Each section gets a unique, attention-grabbing headline based on the actual topic. Example: "Why the 8-Hour Rule Is Wrong for Shift Workers" not "The Author's Position." "The Tweet That Got 1.75M Views About Sleep Debt" not "This Week on X." Specificity is what grabs attention.
  5. No outbound links except the footer CTA. The newsletter summarizes and screenshots everything — readers don't need to leave. No "View the post →" or "Read the full article →" links to X or anywhere else. The only link in the entire newsletter is the footer CTA to your brand site. Every other link is a leak.

Read the full file on GitHub · 618 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. 12d ago First seen · 618 lines · 118 tokens per session scan A 03b6141e549d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

newsletter-writer is a skill published in the GitHub repository travsteward/openwriter (27 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 118 tokens to every session and 8,078 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 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 2026-08-30.

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