writing-beats

writing-beats is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from tt-a1i/matt-skills-with-to-goal. It costs 28 tokens per session (1,088 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of writing-beats, MIT.

A writing process for turning a fixed collection of research or notes into an article made of connected sections called beats. Each beat introduces the ideas needed for the next one.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to establish what readers already know, choose an opening, and write the article one beat at a time from supplied source material.
Why use it?
It prevents an article from relying on unexplained terms and keeps the reader's path through the material deliberate.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter, but also agents/openai.yaml present.

Part of the matt-skills-with-to-goal plugin — 40 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to establish what readers already know, choose an opening, and write the article one beat at a time from supplied source material.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tt-a1i/matt-skills-with-to-goal/writing-beats
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 tt-a1i/matt-skills-with-to-goal --skill writing-beats
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tt-a1i/matt-skills-with-to-goal

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install matt-skills-with-to-goal, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 40 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 writing-beats

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tt-a1i/matt-skills-with-to-goal/writing-beats/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tt-a1i/matt-skills-with-to-goal/writing-beats)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tt-a1i/matt-skills-with-to-goal/writing-beats"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tt-a1i/matt-skills-with-to-goal/writing-beats/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-beats

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tt-a1i/matt-skills-with-to-goal/writing-beats"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tt-a1i/matt-skills-with-to-goal/writing-beats.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 28 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,088 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 100% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00028 $0.01088
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.00544
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00218
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00109

Measured 12d ago against content hash 668185cfb6eb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

writing-beats 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.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to writing-beats — 30 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/in-progress/writing-beats/SKILL.md · 68 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 68 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

The user has passed (or will pass) a markdown file of raw material. This is exploit: the exploring is done, the pile is fixed — commit to a path through it and mine the pile to fill each beat.

If the user did not say where to save the article, ask once and remember the path.

Then run a beat-by-beat journey, choose-your-own-adventure style:

  1. Establish the prerequisites. Before any beats, settle with the user what the audience already knows walking in — the concepts that are grounded from the start. Everything else must be grounded by a beat before a later beat can use it. See Grounding.
  2. Write 2–3 candidate starting beats, drawn from the raw material. Each is a different entry point into the article. Each may only lean on grounded concepts; note what new concepts each one grounds. Show the user the beats before writing to the article file. The user picks one. Preview what beats that pick unlocks — as if the user is seeing a little way down the path.
  3. Once the user picks a starting beat, write only that beat to the article file. A beat may be one sentence or several paragraphs — whatever that beat naturally is. Stop there.
  4. Re-read the article file from disk. Then offer 2–3 candidate next beats — different directions the journey could pivot to from where the article now stands. Each must be reachable from the current grounded set; note what each one grounds.
  5. Loop steps 3–5 until the article reaches a natural end.

Grounding

Every concept has to be grounded before a beat can lean on it: the audience either walked in knowing it or met it in an earlier beat. A beat that reaches for an ungrounded concept loses the reader — that is the one move the journey can't make. The unit is the concept, not the word for it: a beat can lean on an idea the reader lacks even with no jargon in sight. Where a concept has a name — a term — grounding it means landing the idea and the term together.

A concept gets grounded one of two ways:

  • Prerequisite — grounded before the first beat. The audience brings it. Fixed at the start.
  • Introduced — a beat establishes it, and from then on it's grounded for every later beat.

So each beat does two jobs: it requires concepts that are already grounded, and it grounds new ones. Keep a running list of what's grounded so far, and update it each time a beat lands.

This is what shapes the choose-your-own-adventure. A candidate beat is only reachable if everything it requires is already grounded; picking a beat that grounds concept X unlocks every beat that was waiting on X. When you offer next beats, they must all be reachable from the current grounded set — and say what each one grounds, so the user can see which paths it opens.

The big lever is what you make a prerequisite versus what you ground inside the piece. Demand too much up front and you shut out readers who don't have it; ground too much inside and the early beats drown in definitions. Settle this with the user when you establish prerequisites, and revisit it whenever a tempting beat turns out to require a concept nothing has grounded yet — the fix is either a grounding beat before it, or promoting the concept to a prerequisite.

Read the full file on GitHub · 68 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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 · 68 lines · 28 tokens per session scan A 668185cfb6eb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

writing-beats is a skill published in the GitHub repository tt-a1i/matt-skills-with-to-goal (160 stars, last pushed 15d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 28 tokens to every session and 1,088 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to writing-beats, differing in 30 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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