claude-output-styles

claude-output-styles is a skill for Claude Code from vinnie357/claude-skills. It costs 79 tokens per session (2,508 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to output styles and reusable response-format instructions for Claude Code. Output styles change an agent's role, tone, or answer format for a session, while response contracts define the shape of reports from agents or teams.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create session output styles or standardise reports from agents, commands, teams, and skills.
Why use it?
It helps make agent responses consistent and easier for people or programs to read and process.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: Claude Code plugin machinery. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions subagents.

Part of the claude-code plugin — 12 skills, 2 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it to create session output styles or standardise reports from agents, commands, teams, and skills.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/claude-output-styles
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 vinnie357/claude-skills --skill claude-output-styles
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vinnie357/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install claude-code, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 skills, 2 commands.

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 claude-output-styles

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/claude-output-styles/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/claude-output-styles)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/claude-output-styles"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/claude-output-styles/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 claude-output-styles

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/claude-output-styles"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/claude-output-styles.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 79 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,508 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 $0.00079 $0.02508
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.01254
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00502
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00251

Measured 8d ago against content hash 10ed21fdadd1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

claude-output-styles 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 8d 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.

plugins/tools/claude-code/skills/claude-output-styles/SKILL.md · 254 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 254 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Claude Code Output Styles

Guide for the native Claude Code output style feature and for applying the same response-contract pattern to agents, slash commands, teams, and skills.

Two Things This Skill Covers

  1. The Claude Code feature: a session-level system prompt modification selected via /config, shipped as Markdown files, optionally bundled in plugins.
  2. The pattern: a reusable response-format contract authored once and referenced from agents, commands, teams, or skills when consistent, parseable output is needed.

The feature affects the main agent loop only. The pattern is portable to anywhere a system prompt or instruction block is authored.

Part 1: The Claude Code Feature

What Output Styles Do

Output styles modify Claude Code's system prompt at session start. They can:

  • Replace the default software-engineering instructions with a different role/tone/format
  • Preserve core capabilities (file I/O, running scripts, TODO tracking)
  • Keep or remove coding-specific instructions via keep-coding-instructions

Output styles are always active once selected, for the whole session. They are set at session start — changes take effect next session so prompt caching stays stable.

Built-In Styles

Style Behavior
Default Standard software-engineering system prompt
Proactive Executes immediately, makes reasonable assumptions instead of pausing for routine decisions, and prefers action over planning — stronger autonomous-execution guidance than auto mode, applied without changing the permission mode
Concise Leads with the result, skips preamble and narration, keeps responses short by default, while doing the engineering work as thoroughly as Default; error reports, security warnings, and destructive-action confirmations stay in full. Requires Claude Code v2.1.237+
Explanatory Adds educational "Insights" during task completion
Learning Collaborative mode — Claude inserts TODO(human) markers for the user to fill in

Read the full file on GitHub · 254 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 8d ago First seen · 254 lines · 79 tokens per session scan A 10ed21fdadd1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

claude-output-styles is a skill published in the GitHub repository vinnie357/claude-skills (25 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 79 tokens to every session and 2,508 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-09-03.

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