stylewright

Writing skills for coding agents, distilled from named standards.

Install them into Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and Codex, at user scope or project scope.

This document is written under the rules of one of the skills it ships. A continuous-integration job checks it with stylewright lint.

Why this exists

An agent writes documentation all day. It has no house style unless you give it one. Most guidance you can give it is invented on the spot, and it changes each time you ask.

stylewright gives an agent writing rules that come from somewhere. Each rule in the standards/ tier traces to a numbered rule in a published standard. You can check the trace. That is the point.

The two tiers

| Tier | What it means | |---|---| | standards/ | Every skill is distilled from a named standard that you can read at a public URL. Every statement traces to a numbered rule. | | craft/ | Every skill encodes writing discipline that has no external standard behind it. The authority is ours, and the skill says so. |

Install one tier, the other, or both.

Skills

| Skill | Tier | Source | License of the source | |---|---|---|---| | simplified-technical-english | standards | ASD-STE100 Issue 9 (2025) | (c) ASD 2025. All rights reserved. See the skill SOURCE.md. | | plain-language | standards | Federal Plain Language Guidelines | CC0 1.0 Universal. Public domain. |

The craft/ tier is empty today. More skills are in progress. See CONTRIBUTING.md to add one.

The standards disagree, and that is the point

plain-language tells you to use contractions. simplified-technical-english tells you not to. Neither is wrong. One writes for a general public reader who must act, and the other writes for a technician who follows a procedure.

Pick the standard that matches your reader, and follow one standard in one document. The grounding matrix shows you which rule came from where, so you can see exactly where two standards part company.

Install

With the installer

Run one command and answer four questions. You do not need to know the flags, the directory layout, or the skill names.

npx stylewright install

The dialogue asks:

1. Which skills do you want. Every skill starts selected. Remove the ones you do not want.
2. Which platforms. The installer looks in your home directory first and pre-selects the agents that it finds.
3. Which scope, user or project. Each choice shows the directory that it resolves to.
4. Whether to go ahead. The summary shows every file destination before anything is written.

Answer nothing and press Enter four times to install everything to the agents that you already use.

Skills already installed are marked in the list, so a replacement never surprises you.

With flags, for a repeatable command

Any selecting flag turns the dialogue off. Use this in a script or a dotfiles repository.

npx stylewright install --tier standards --platform claude,codex --scope user
npx stylewright install --skill simplified-technical-english --platform claude

Repeat --skill to select more than one. Run npx stylewright list for the names.

To run the code on the default branch instead of the last release, use npx github:rookslog/stylewright in place of npx stylewright.

The installer copies files. It does not create symbolic links. A symbolic link breaks when the clone moves.

With Codex, and no installer

Codex ships a skill installer. Give it a path in this repository:

scripts/install-skill-from-github.py \
  --repo rookslog/stylewright \
  --path skills/standards/simplified-technical-english

By hand

Copy the directory. This always works.

git clone https://github.com/rookslog/stylewright
cp -R stylewright/skills/standards/simplified-technical-english ~/.claude/skills/

Where files go

| Platform | Scope | Path | |---|---|---| | claude | user | ~/.claude/skills | | claude | project | ./.claude/skills | | cowork | user | ~/.claude/skills | | codex | user | ~/.codex/skills | | codex | project | ./.codex/skills | | agents | user | ~/.agents/skills |

Cowork reads the Claude directory. The two names resolve to one path.

Commands

| Command | What it does | |---|---| | install | Copy skills to the platforms and scope that you select. | | update | Copy new versions. Stop when a file has local edits. | | uninstall | Remove only the files that the installer wrote. | | list | Show the skills in this repository. | | doctor | Report problems, such as one skill installed in two places. | | lint | Check a Markdown file against the mechanical rules below. | | ground | Check that each grounding matrix still matches its skill. | | new-skill | Scaffold a new skill that passes both checks from the start. |

Update is safe

Run update with no flags. It reads the manifests that the installer wrote, so it already knows which agents and scopes hold your skills.

The installer records a hash of each file that it writes. update compares the hash first. When you have edited an installed skill, update stops and tells you which files changed. Add --force to overwrite.

update also stops when a file sits at a path it is about to write and the manifest never recorded it. That file is yours, and the tool does not know what is in it.

A file that an earlier version installed, and that this version no longer ships, is removed. Otherwise it stays on disk with no owner, and uninstall cannot reach it.

Narrow it with --skill, --platform, or --scope. A skill that this repository no longer ships is reported and left alone. Uninstall it by name when you want it gone.

What no-flag update covers. User scope, plus this directory. A project install in another directory cannot be discovered from here, so run update in that project too.

Uninstall is exact

uninstall removes the recorded files and nothing else. A note that you added to a skill directory stays.

When the last skill goes, the manifest goes with it, and the empty skills directory goes too. The agent's own directory stays, because the agent owns it.

The lint

stylewright lint checks the part of ASD-STE100 that a program can check:

• Procedural sentences of no more than 20 words.
• Descriptive sentences of no more than 25 words.
• No semicolons.
• No contractions.
• Procedure steps that start with an imperative verb.

The lint skips code blocks, tables, link targets, and blockquotes. A blockquote holds quoted material, and a before-and-after guide quotes text that is wrong on purpose.

The lint does not check vocabulary. Vocabulary compliance needs the controlled dictionary, which this repository does not ship.

Grounding matrices

Each skill has a grounding matrix in grounding/. The matrix maps every statement in the skill to its rule in the standard.

Rows come in two kinds:

• A G row traces to the standard. It names the rule, such as Rule 5.1.
• An E row is our own editorial guidance. Its rule cell is empty.

The distinction is the point of the file. It shows you which instructions carry the authority of the standard, and which carry only ours.

Matrices stay in this repository. They do not install with a skill. A matrix is an audit record for a reader, and an agent does not need it while it writes.

stylewright ground --check --all fails when a skill changes and its matrix does not.

Licensing

Sources impose different licenses, so one license for the whole repository cannot work.

• The engine, the tests, and the tooling are MIT. See LICENSE.
• Each skill in standards/ carries the license of its source. See the LICENSE file in the skill directory.
• Each skill in craft/ is MIT.

Notices

No skill in this repository is affiliated with, endorsed by, or approved by the owner of the standard that it cites.

ASD-STE100 and Simplified Technical English are European Union registered trademarks owned by the Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries Association of Europe, number 017966390.

A skill states the rules in our own words, quotes the source where the exact wording is what you need to check, and links to the official document. No skill carries enough of a standard to replace it.

Contributing

Read CONTRIBUTING.md first. It covers how to choose a source, how to write a grounding matrix, and what a pull request needs.

Do not create skill files by hand. The scaffold puts them in the right places and starts green on both checks.

node bin/stylewright.mjs new-skill plain-language --tier standards \
  --source "Federal Plain Language Guidelines" \
  --url "https://digital.gov/guides/plain-language" \
  --license "CC0 1.0"

Run every check before you open a pull request:

npm run check

This project follows the Contributor Covenant. Report a vulnerability privately, as described in SECURITY.md.