technical-english

technical-english is a skill for Claude Code from vinnie357/claude-skills. It costs 119 tokens per session (1,636 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing guide for technical instructions and explanations. It defines a precise style for procedures and a more flexible style for background text.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when writing skill descriptions, agent definitions, slash commands, documentation, issue criteria, commit subjects, or architecture decisions.
Why use it?
It helps prevent unclear wording in instructions, commands, error messages, and acceptance criteria. This makes technical text easier for both people and automated agents to interpret.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions subagents.

Part of the core plugin — 14 skills, 5 commands, 7 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it when writing skill descriptions, agent definitions, slash commands, documentation, issue criteria, commit subjects, or architecture decisions.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install core, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 14 skills, 5 commands, 7 agents, 1 hook.

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 technical-english

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/technical-english"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/technical-english.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 119 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,636 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 warn 7 Sept 2026
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 Agent Snooping · line 74
    Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.
    Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
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 $0.00119 $0.01636
Opus 5 $0.00060 $0.00818
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00327
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00164

Measured 11d ago against content hash 26daaa9fac2e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

technical-english 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 11d 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/core/skills/technical-english/SKILL.md · 107 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 107 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Technical English

Technical English is a controlled-language discipline for procedural and explanatory writing. It sets one strict register for instructions and a second, looser register for context and rationale.

Two registers

Pick the register from the artifact, not from taste.

Artifact Register Why
Skill descriptions Strict Claude parses these at load; ambiguity misfires activation
Procedure steps Strict A step is an instruction, not a discussion
Agent definitions Strict Dispatch logic runs unattended; one meaning per term
Slash commands Strict Arguments and flags need exact, repeatable wording
Output contracts Strict A caller parses a worker's report by its shape
Error and CI-failure text Strict A reader hits this under time pressure
Bees titles and acceptance criteria Strict Criteria must be checkable, not interpreted
Commit subjects Strict One line, one fact, searchable history
ADR Decision lines Strict The decision is the artifact; hedging voids it
SKILL.md explanatory sections Flavored Context needs nuance and connecting prose
references/*.md Flavored Depth material rewards variety and color
READMEs Flavored A README sells the project before it instructs
ADR Context and Consequences Flavored Trade-offs need qualification, not a checklist
PR bodies Flavored A reviewer wants the story, not a manual

The strict rule set

  1. Give every term exactly one meaning and one part of speech, and hold that meaning across the whole document set.
  2. Write every instruction and every procedure step in active voice.
  3. Reserve passive voice for description, and only when no one knows the actor.
  4. Use five tenses only: imperative, simple present, simple past, simple future, infinitive.
  5. Put one instruction in each sentence.
  6. Cap procedure sentences at 20 words and description sentences at 25.
  7. Cap each paragraph at 6 sentences and one topic.
  8. Never drop an article, a subject, or a verb.
  9. State a warning, a caution, or a precondition before the step it governs.
  10. Choose the short word, the concrete noun, and the verb over its noun form.
  11. Cut a qualifier or an adverb that only restates its verb.
  12. Reread the draft once, and cut what the first pass missed.

Read the full file on GitHub · 107 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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. 11d ago First seen · 107 lines · 119 tokens per session scan A 26daaa9fac2e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

technical-english is a skill published in the GitHub repository vinnie357/claude-skills (25 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 119 tokens to every session and 1,636 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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