pencil

pencil is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from zvadaadam/deus-machine. It costs 52 tokens per session (1,177 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A live design tool for creating, changing, and exporting web, mobile, marketing, and other visual designs on an interactive canvas.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create or open Pencil design files, build layouts and screens, edit visual elements, and export design assets.
Why use it?
It lets an agent make design changes while the user watches them appear immediately in the open canvas.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to create or open Pencil design files, build layouts and screens, edit visual elements, and export design assets.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/zvadaadam/deus-machine/pencil
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 zvadaadam/deus-machine --skill pencil
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/zvadaadam/deus-machine

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 pencil

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zvadaadam/deus-machine/pencil.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/zvadaadam/deus-machine/pencil)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zvadaadam/deus-machine/pencil"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zvadaadam/deus-machine/pencil.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,177 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 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 $0.00052 $0.01177
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00589
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00235
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00118

Measured 7d ago against content hash 3414fd0281d7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pencil 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 7d 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.

packages/pencil/skills/pencil/SKILL.md · 82 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 82 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Pencil

Pencil renders a real interactive canvas in the user's panel. Every op the agent makes shows up on the canvas immediately — there's no batch mode, no spinner, no 30‑second waits. The user watches the design build.

Tool surface

All design work goes through the live editor tools (provided by the bundled MCP binary, bridged to the iframe). The agent never spawns a CLI subprocess.

Workspace navigation (4 — ours)

  • pencil_list_designs() — every .pen in the workspace (workspace files + agent‑generated). Filesystem only.
  • pencil_get_active() — which .pen is currently displayed in the panel. Use when the user says "this design" / "the open one".
  • pencil_open({ file? | name? }) — switch the editor panel to a different .pen. Workspace‑aware path resolution.
  • pencil_new({ name }) — create a brand‑new blank canvas. Sets the save target to <workspace>/.pencil/designs/<name>.pen and tells the editor to open a fresh empty document. After this, drive the design with batch_design.

Live editor (13 — Pencil's native tools, bridged)

  • batch_design({ operations }) — the workhorse. Run a script of insert/copy/update/replace/move/delete/image ops in one call. ≤25 ops per batch so the user sees progress.
  • batch_get({ patterns?, nodeIds? }) — read nodes by ID or pattern. Use to discover structure before editing.
  • get_editor_state({ include_schema }) — current document, selection, and (if requested) the .pen schema. Call once with include_schema: true at the start of a task; false for follow‑ups.
  • get_screenshot({ nodeId }) — PNG of any node for visual verification.
  • snapshot_layout({ parentId, maxDepth?, problemsOnly? }) — compact node tree for layout reasoning.
  • find_empty_space_on_canvas({ width, height, direction, padding }) — pick a non‑overlapping region for new content.
  • open_document(filePath | "new") — switch documents at the editor level (lower‑level than pencil_open; prefer pencil_open for existing files because it also updates the panel switcher).
  • replace_all_matching_properties / search_all_unique_properties — mass property edits / discovery.
  • set_variables / get_variables — design tokens.
  • export_nodes({ nodeIds, format, scale, quality? }) — render specific nodes to image files.
  • get_guidelines(category?, name?) — Pencil's own .pen syntax + style guides. Always call get_guidelines("general") once at the start of any batch_design work — the op syntax is non‑obvious and these guides are how you learn it.

Read the full file on GitHub · 82 lines

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. 7d ago First seen · 82 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A 3414fd0281d7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pencil is a skill published in the GitHub repository zvadaadam/deus-machine (24 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 1,177 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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