Claude Skills Journalism

Journalism agent skills

Project: Journalism skills maintenance

A collection of Agent Skills for journalists, researchers, academics, media professionals, and communications practitioners. The same repository serves Claude Code and Codex while keeping Claude-only commands, agents, and hooks clearly labeled.

Docs site: skills.amditis.tech, interactive skill browser, setup guides, and full documentation.

Guides

Setup and workflow guides, separate from the skills themselves:

Guide	Description
The Codex review setup I run	Code-review setup, everyday workflow, and model-routing notes
Autonomous and hands-on dev work	A first-person account of running dev work with Claude in two modes, autonomous sessions that pull tasks off GitHub issues, and hands-on multi-agent reviews at the keyboard, held to one quality bar, with copy-able prompts to adapt the approach to your own agent
Multi-agent workflows	Plain-language guide to running many AI agents on one job, fan-out, pipeline, and adversarial-verify patterns, with real examples from ICIJ, The Markup, Full Fact, and Elicit, plus honest cautions
Dot skills	An unofficial workshop for ChatGPT dots, OpenAI's always-on agents: Markdown playbooks for status cards, incident updates, visual audits, and source evidence, a small progress-tracker lab, and honest field notes. There is no dot marketplace yet, so these are shared here
A month with two ChatGPT dots	A first-person field report on running two dots in newsroom Slack workspaces: repeated approvals, daily computer crashes, a message sent from the wrong account, the Blender work that surprised me, and the skills that kept them usable
Persistent sessions	Keep Claude Code sessions alive through disconnects using tmux, setup, key bindings, activity notifications, and scheduler coexistence

What are agent skills?

Skills are modular instruction sets that an AI coding agent loads when relevant to a task. Each skill contains domain knowledge, workflows, templates, and supporting files. Shared skills in this repository follow the Agent Skills specification; Claude and Codex provide their own installation and runtime layers around that shared content.

Repository control plane

skills-catalog.yaml lists every package and stable skill. It records each skill's package, path, lifecycle, and invocation mode. The defaults preserve the existing model-selected invocation behavior.

Each stable skill includes agents/openai.yaml for Codex display metadata. These files do not change invocation policy. Run npm run validate:catalog to check catalog coverage, package mappings, skill names, and metadata files.

See INFLUENCES.md and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for design credit and license notices.

Installation

Choose the section for your client. During the Codex pilot, use only one Codex installation path for a given skill or package.

Claude Code

Prerequisite: You need Claude Code installed. Run claude --version in your terminal to check.

Plugins (recommended)

Plugins bundle skills and, where provided, commands, agents, or hooks. The table below lists each package’s commands. Run these two commands inside a Claude Code session:

/plugin marketplace add jamditis/claude-skills-journalism
/plugin install pdf-playground@claude-skills-journalism

Then restart Claude Code (close and reopen). See the PDF Playground README for detailed setup instructions and troubleshooting.

Available plugins:

Plugin	Description	Commands	Updated
autocontext	Cross-session knowledge persistence with skill evolution. Lessons accumulate per-skill, and /autocontext:evolve folds them back into skill files	/autocontext:setup, /autocontext:init, /autocontext:review, /autocontext:status, /autocontext:evolve	Nov 4, 2026
dev-toolkit	Fourteen development-focused skills for journalists, researchers, and small newsroom dev teams: accessibility, context management, minimal-code implementation, UI completeness, directed multi-agent execution, Electron, mobile debugging, Python pipelines, ethical scraping, no-build frontends, web UI craft, and project instruction maintenance	/dev-toolkit:director; other skills model-selected	Nov 4, 2026
journalism-core	Sixteen core journalism skills, including AP-style writing, AI-slop detoxing, source verification (deepfakes/C2PA), FOIA + NJ OPRA requests, Brazilian LAI requests, fact-checking, interview prep, transcription + meeting actions, story pitches, editorial workflow, crisis communications, newsletter publishing with current Gmail / Yahoo / Outlook bulk-sender requirements, and embedded photo metadata for wire distribution	n/a, skills only	Nov 4, 2026
newsroom-agent-ops	Nine skills for safe recurring newsroom work: unattended runs, briefings, intake, delivery, coordination, reconciliation, chat triage, deadline tracking, and issue progression	n/a, skills only	Nov 4, 2026
okf-wiki	Scaffold an Open Knowledge Format (OKF) knowledge base: one-concept-per-file markdown with YAML frontmatter, directory navigation, and a validator. Generates a starter wiki that passes its own conformance and secret-leak checks, ships session-start hooks that orient Claude on the knowledge base before it works, and includes an optional GitHub-wiki bootstrap. For newsroom institutional memory, research atlases, decision logs, and infrastructure maps	n/a, skill only	Nov 4, 2026
pdf-design	PDF report and proposal design system with brand variables, budget tables, and reusable content blocks (stats strips, three-column, four-tile pillars, partner grids)	n/a, skill-only	Nov 4, 2026
pdf-playground	Create branded proposals, reports, one-pagers, newsletters, slides, and event materials with an interactive control panel for live design editing (colors, fonts, spacing, sections) and a guided wizard for proposals	/pdf-playground:proposal, /pdf-playground:report, /pdf-playground:onepager, /pdf-playground:newsletter, /pdf-playground:slides, /pdf-playground:event, /pdf-playground:preview	Nov 4, 2026
project-templates-toolkit	Four skills for setting up, tracking, and closing out journalism projects: a project instruction writer (institutional knowledge), a LESSONS.md retrospective writer (failures and decisions), a template-selector decision tree across 6 project types, and an evidence-based weighted progress tracker	n/a, skills only	Nov 4, 2026
research-toolkit	Six skills for research, source preservation, and academic workflows: academic writing, legal paywall-bypass via Unpaywall and library databases, web archiving (Wayback / Archive.today / ArchiveBox), web page change monitoring, AI-enriched digital archive construction, and a curated free-API catalog with sunset currency notes (IEX Cloud, CrowdTangle, ProPublica Congress, X, Reddit)	n/a, skills only	Nov 4, 2026
security-toolkit	Five defensive security skills covering OWASP Top 10 fundamentals, supply-chain hardening, and secret scanning: pre-deployment audit checklists (auth, input validation, secrets management), secure authentication patterns (password hashing, session management, JWT, OAuth, passkeys), API hardening (rate limiting, CORS, request throttling, defense-in-depth for Express, FastAPI, and serverless), and npm/bun supply-chain hardening with install-time cooldown plus a sandboxed pre-install scan for the bypass case (defends against Mini Shai-Hulud-class worms)	/security-toolkit:hotpatch	Nov 4, 2026
superjawn	Research-augmented fork of obra/superpowers. Default-on research phase fires before brainstorming, systematic-debugging, and writing-skills. Includes 13 skills with no soft dependencies on the upstream superpowers plugin	invoked indirectly via skills (e.g. superjawn:brainstorming, superjawn:systematic-debugging, superjawn:writing-plans)	Nov 4, 2026
video-toolkit	Four composable skills for social-video accountability reporting: downloading public video from Twitter/X, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook; transcribing it with a provenance sidecar and a CPU path any evaluator can re-run; extracting and vision-analyzing frames; and aggregating the result into an interactive dashboard	n/a, skills only	Nov 4, 2026
web-design-picker	Build two to five distinct website directions, a switchable client review site, downloadable design assets, preview images, static QA reports, and separate Cloudflare Drop and design-handoff packages	n/a, skill only	Nov 4, 2026
visual-explainer	HTML diagrams, data tables, architecture views, slide decks, and KPI dashboards adapted from nicobailon/visual-explainer with journalism, newsroom, and academic design sensibilities	/visual-explainer:project-recap	Nov 4, 2026

Skills (manual installation)

Most skills live inside a plugin's skills/ directory. The okf-wiki/SKILL.md, pdf-design/SKILL.md, visual-explainer/SKILL.md, and web-design-picker/SKILL.md root-skill packages keep the skill at the package root. To install one skill without taking a whole plugin, clone the repo and copy or symlink the directory that directly contains its SKILL.md. Claude Code discovers skills at ~/.claude/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md, one level deep:

git clone https://github.com/jamditis/claude-skills-journalism.git ~/projects/claude-skills-journalism
cd ~/projects/claude-skills-journalism
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills

# Pull a single skill out of a plugin's skills/ directory:
cp -r journalism-core/skills/source-verification ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r research-toolkit/skills/free-apis-catalog ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r research-toolkit/skills/web-archiving ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r dev-toolkit/skills/web-scraping ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r dev-toolkit/skills/director ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r newsroom-agent-ops/skills/unattended-agent-runs ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r security-toolkit/skills/secure-auth ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r project-templates-toolkit/skills/project-memory ~/.claude/skills/

# A root-skill package is already the directory to copy:
cp -r okf-wiki ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r web-design-picker ~/.claude/skills/

# Or symlink so git pull updates them in place (ln -sfn replaces an existing link):
ln -sfn "$PWD/research-toolkit/skills/free-apis-catalog" ~/.claude/skills/free-apis-catalog
ln -sfn "$PWD/dev-toolkit/skills/director" ~/.claude/skills/director
ln -sfn "$PWD/web-design-picker" ~/.claude/skills/web-design-picker
ln -sfn "$PWD/visual-explainer" ~/.claude/skills/visual-explainer

The standalone copy or link invokes the skill as /director. The installed plugin invokes it as /dev-toolkit:director because Claude Code namespaces plugin skills.

Do not clone the repo directly into ~/.claude/skills/journalism-skills/, that nests each SKILL.md too deep and Claude Code won't find them.

Codex

Prerequisite: Install Codex CLI. Run codex --version in your terminal to check. The legacy-compatible package route below is verified with Codex CLI 0.147.0.

Codex can install journalism-core through this repository's Claude marketplace metadata:

codex plugin marketplace add jamditis/claude-skills-journalism
codex plugin add journalism-core@claude-skills-journalism

This legacy-compatible package route exposes the 16 nested journalism-core skills. It does not convert Claude commands, agents, hooks, or root-level skills into Codex components. This repository ships Codex UI metadata but no native Codex plugin manifests.

You can instead install standards-based skills with the skills CLI. This user-level command makes the 16 core skills available across your Codex projects:

npx skills@latest add https://github.com/jamditis/claude-skills-journalism/tree/master/journalism-core \
  --skill '*' --agent codex --copy -g -y

That command installs journalism-core in Codex's documented user skill directory, ~/.agents/skills. The clean-install canary checks that exact global destination. Remove -g to install into the current project's .agents/skills directory and record the source and content hashes in that project's skills-lock.json. To install one skill instead:

npx skills@latest add jamditis/claude-skills-journalism \
  --skill fact-check-workflow --agent codex --copy -g -y

Codex desktop can import skills from another agent. Import leaves the source installation in place. Until duplicate-identity and uninstall behavior has been tested for this repository, do not import a skill and also install the same skill through npx skills or the package route.

Codex's bundled skill installer writes to a different Codex-specific directory and is not a tested installation path for this repository. Codex does not deduplicate same-name skills across install roots, so don't combine it with the .agents/skills route above.

Use only one Codex installation path for the same skill identity.

See the checked-in Codex compatibility matrix for tested versions, package boundaries, and pending runtime gates. A valid install is not a package-wide runtime support claim. The historical pilots remain tied to their recorded snapshots.

Claude.ai

Skills can be added via the Claude.ai interface under Settings > Skills.

Skills overview

The Updated column in every table below is the date that skill or plugin last changed, taken from git history rather than typed by hand. Use it to judge whether your installed copy has drifted: a skill that cites statutes, platform APIs, or vendor behavior is worth re-checking against its sources once it is several months old. The same dates appear as tape on each card at skills.amditis.tech, where the tape yellows with age.

Core journalism skills (in journalism-core plugin)

These sixteen skills ship together as the journalism-core plugin. Install via /plugin install journalism-core@claude-skills-journalism to get all of them at once.

Skill	Description	Updated
ai-writing-detox	Eliminate AI-generated patterns that erode reader trust. Banned words, phrases, and structures with alternatives	Oct 23, 2026
brazil-records-requests	Public records requests under Brazil's Access to Information Law (Lei 12.527/2011), portal selection across federal, state, municipal, judicial and legislative bodies; deadlines; the four-level appeal chain (first instance, agency head, CGU, CMRI); templates in Portuguese with English glosses	Aug 21, 2026
crisis-communications	Breaking news protocol, rapid verification, crisis response, misinformation countering	Aug 21, 2026
data-journalism	Dataset analysis, chart and map creation, statistical reasoning, data-driven story structure	Aug 21, 2026
editorial-workflow	Story assignment tracking, deadline management, editorial calendars, handoff protocols	Aug 21, 2026
fact-check-workflow	Claim extraction, evidence gathering, rating scales, correction protocols	Aug 21, 2026
foia-requests	Public records request drafting (federal FOIA + NJ OPRA), tracking, appeals, current statutory citations	Oct 23, 2026
interview-prep	Pre-interview research, question frameworks, recording consent, attribution guidelines	Aug 21, 2026
interview-transcription	Whisper / WhisperX transcription pipelines, quote management, speaker diarization	Oct 23, 2026
meeting-transcript-actions	Turn verified meeting transcripts into attributed notes, owned actions, decisions, and unresolved questions	Oct 23, 2026
newsletter-publishing	Email newsletter creation, subscriber management, deliverability, 2024–2026 Gmail / Yahoo / Outlook bulk-sender compliance	Aug 21, 2026
newsroom-style	AP Style enforcement, attribution rules, headline formatting, number conventions	Aug 21, 2026
photo-metadata	Embed caption, byline, credit, alt text, keywords, copyright / Creative Commons license, AI-source labeling (IPTC Digital Source Type), and Google-Images licensing into a photo's IPTC/EXIF/XMP metadata; strip GPS for source protection; read C2PA Content Credentials; batch-tag a folder for a news wire	Aug 21, 2026
social-media-intelligence	Narrative tracking, coordinated-campaign analysis, account authenticity checks, OSINT for digital investigations	Aug 21, 2026
source-verification	SIFT method, image and video verification, deepfake detection (2026), C2PA Content Credentials, verification trails	Aug 21, 2026
story-pitch	Pitch templates for daily news, features, investigations, op-eds, and freelance queries	Aug 21, 2026

Newsroom agent operations skills

These nine skills ship together as the newsroom-agent-ops plugin.

Skill	Description	Updated
unattended-agent-runs	Run recurring work with leases, checkpoints, recovery, delivery checks, and resource limits	Oct 23, 2026
scheduled-briefing	Build concise, source-backed, phone-readable newsroom briefings	Oct 23, 2026
deadline-and-reply-tracking	Track due dates, acknowledgments, replies, waiting states, and next-owner actions	Oct 23, 2026
email-request-intake	Process allowlisted email requests while treating messages and attachments as untrusted data	Oct 23, 2026
document-delivery	Inspect, share, send, and verify editable documents and PDFs	Oct 23, 2026
chat-mention-triage	Classify team-chat mentions without duplicating the designated live responder	Oct 23, 2026
record-reconciliation	Reconcile task, contact, and interaction records with privacy controls and readback	Oct 23, 2026
multi-agent-coordinator	Coordinate workers with durable prompts, event-driven watches, review gates, and cleanup	Oct 23, 2026
issue-pool-progression	Advance claimed issues through review, release, deployment, and live verification	Oct 23, 2026

Research and academic skills (in research-toolkit plugin)

These six skills ship together as the research-toolkit plugin. Install via /plugin install research-toolkit@claude-skills-journalism to get all of them at once.

Skill	Description	Updated
academic-writing	Research design, literature reviews, IMRaD structure, peer review responses, grant proposals	Oct 23, 2026
content-access	Unpaywall, CORE, Semantic Scholar APIs, library databases, ethical access patterns	Aug 21, 2026
digital-archive	Building archives with AI enrichment, entity extraction, knowledge graphs	Oct 23, 2026
free-apis-catalog	Curated free-API catalog organized by journalism use-case, with currency notes for major API sunsets (IEX Cloud, CrowdTangle, ProPublica Congress, X, Reddit) and an evaluation rubric	Aug 21, 2026
page-monitoring	Change detection, RSS generation, webhook alerts, automatic archiving on changes	Aug 21, 2026
web-archiving	Wayback Machine, Archive.today, legal evidence preservation, multi-archive redundancy	Aug 21, 2026

Design and production

Skill	Description	Updated
pdf-design	Professional PDF reports and proposals with brand system, budget tables, and multi-page layouts. For the full interactive experience, use pdf-playground instead	Nov 4, 2026
web-design-picker	Produce distinct responsive website directions, a client review picker, downloadable design assets, preview images, static QA reports, and deployment and handoff packages	Nov 4, 2026
visual-explainer	Turn complex data into styled HTML pages, architecture diagrams, data tables, flowcharts, timelines, source maps, and dashboards with dark/light theme support. Now registered as a plugin (/plugin install visual-explainer@claude-skills-journalism)	Nov 4, 2026

PDF Playground skill

This skill ships inside the pdf-playground plugin.

Skill	Description	Updated
document-design	Create print-ready HTML proposals, reports, one-pagers, newsletters, slides, flyers, and other PDF-ready documents with reusable brand and layout patterns	Oct 23, 2026

Superjawn skills

These thirteen skills ship inside the superjawn plugin.

Skill	Description	Updated
brainstorming	Explore intent, requirements, design, and relevant research before creative implementation work	Oct 23, 2026
dispatching-parallel-agents	Divide independent tasks among parallel agents without shared-state conflicts	Oct 23, 2026
executing-plans	Execute a written implementation plan with freshness and review checkpoints	Oct 23, 2026
finishing-a-development-branch	Verify completed work and choose a safe integration, pull request, or cleanup path	Oct 23, 2026
receiving-code-review	Evaluate review feedback against the code before implementing it	Oct 23, 2026
requesting-code-review	Request focused review before integration or after a major implementation	Oct 23, 2026
subagent-driven-development	Execute independent plan tasks with agents in the current session	Oct 23, 2026
systematic-debugging	Investigate root cause and relevant evidence before proposing a bug fix	Oct 23, 2026
using-git-worktrees	Create isolated worktrees with safe directory selection and verification	Oct 23, 2026
using-superjawn	Discover and invoke the right Superjawn skill for the current task	Oct 23, 2026
verification-before-completion	Run and inspect verification evidence before claiming work is complete	Oct 3, 2026
writing-plans	Turn a specification or requirements into a checked implementation plan	Oct 23, 2026
writing-skills	Research, create, edit, and verify reusable skills	Oct 23, 2026

Project documentation skills (in project-templates-toolkit plugin)

These four skills ship together as the project-templates-toolkit plugin. Install via /plugin install project-templates-toolkit@claude-skills-journalism to get all of them at once.

Skill	Description	Updated
goal-progress-bar	Render weighted progress with current evidence, scope changes, blocked-state checks, and protection against false 100%	Oct 28, 2026
project-memory	Generate project instruction files that capture project-specific knowledge. Includes templates for editorial tools, events, publications, research, pipelines, and archives	Oct 23, 2026
project-retrospective	Generate LESSONS.md files that document what worked and what didn't. Templates for investigations, events, publications, and tools	Aug 21, 2026
template-selector	Decision tree for choosing the right project documentation template	Oct 23, 2026

Development skills (in dev-toolkit plugin)

These fourteen skills ship together as the dev-toolkit plugin. Install via /plugin install dev-toolkit@claude-skills-journalism to get all of them at once, or copy individual skills from dev-toolkit/skills/<name>/.

Skill	Description	Updated
accessibility-compliance	WCAG 2.2 baseline, alt text, focus management, motion preferences, accessible charts	Aug 21, 2026
claude-md-updater	Detect durable session lessons and propose scoped project instruction edits for approval	Oct 23, 2026
context-engineering-fundamentals	Attention budget, lost-in-middle recall, context degradation patterns, and mitigations for long sessions	Aug 21, 2026
director	Explicit top-tier direction through workers configured in the applicable project instruction file	Oct 23, 2026
electron-dev	Electron security model (contextIsolation, sandbox), IPC patterns, packaging	Aug 21, 2026
mobile-debugging	Eruda, vConsole, Chrome DevTools on Android, Safari Web Inspector for iOS, console capture	Oct 4, 2026
one-way-door	Flag irreversible architectural decisions (data models, infra, auth, APIs) before committing	Oct 23, 2026
ponytail-dev	Implement or review software with minimal code and proportional checks	Oct 23, 2026
python-pipeline	Data pipelines (pandas, polars, DuckDB, asyncio) with modular architecture	Oct 23, 2026
surface-completeness	Verify UI coverage, accessibility, browser support, performance evidence, and current documentation	Oct 28, 2026
vibe-coding	AI-assisted development workflow (Claude Code, Cursor, Aider, Continue)	Oct 23, 2026
web-scraping	Ethical scraping patterns (Playwright, robots.txt, anti-bot defense, terms-of-service)	Oct 23, 2026
web-ui-best-practices	Container queries, :has(), view transitions, scroll-driven animations, signs of taste in web UI	Aug 21, 2026
zero-build-frontend	ESM import maps, htmx, Alpine.js, no-build deployment	Aug 21, 2026

Security skills (in security-toolkit plugin)

These five skills ship together as the security-toolkit plugin, paired with the /security-toolkit:hotpatch slash command. Install via /plugin install security-toolkit@claude-skills-journalism to get all of them at once.

Skill	Description	Updated
api-hardening	Rate limiting, input validation, CORS, security headers, API key management, defense-in-depth for Express, FastAPI, and serverless	Aug 21, 2026
private-secret-scanning	Local Gitleaks scans for staged changes, push ranges, and full history in private repositories, with pre-commit and pre-push hooks, redacted reports, and a fail-closed self-test	Oct 23, 2026
secure-auth	Production-ready authentication patterns: password hashing, session management, JWT, OAuth, passkeys / WebAuthn, MFA	Aug 21, 2026
security-checklist	Pre-deployment security audit covering OWASP Top 10 fundamentals: authentication, input validation, secrets, database security, compliance basics	Oct 23, 2026
supply-chain-hardening	npm/bun install-time cooldown plus sandboxed pre-install scan (bwrap on Linux, sandbox-exec on macOS). Defends against Mini Shai-Hulud-class worms; paired with /security-toolkit:hotpatch for the cooldown-bypass case	Oct 23, 2026

Video analysis skills (in video-toolkit plugin)

These four skills ship together as the video-toolkit plugin and compose into one pipeline. Install via /plugin install video-toolkit@claude-skills-journalism, or copy individual skills from video-toolkit/skills/<name>/.

Skill	What it does	Updated
video-download	Collect public video from Twitter/X, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook via yt-dlp, with a browser-automation fallback for broken extractors	Aug 21, 2026
video-transcribe	Batch Whisper transcription with a provenance sidecar per transcript; the CPU whisper.cpp path is the transcript of record so an auditor can re-run it without a GPU	Aug 21, 2026
video-frames	Extract frames, build 3x3 grid composites, and run vision analysis over on-screen text, setting, and presentation style	Sep 23, 2026
video-dashboard	Aggregate transcripts and frame analysis into topic, tone, and cross-platform views behind a single-page dashboard	Aug 21, 2026

Hooks

Hooks are automated checks that run at specific points in your workflow. Most are non-blocking warnings. one-way-door-check and no-ai-attribution block until you resolve them. prose-question-guard blocks a stop once to move a question into AskUserQuestion.

The 17 standalone hooks in hooks/ are optional and installed manually from their reference files. Installing a skill package does not enable these top-level hooks. The prose question guard uses Python 3 on Windows, macOS, and Linux; its public guide includes platform-specific setup and an example from my Claude Code session.

Writing quality hooks

Hook	Event	Description
ap-style-check	PostToolUse	Flag common AP Style violations
ai-slop-detector	PostToolUse	Warn about AI-generated patterns
accessibility-check	PostToolUse	Check alt text, heading structure, link text
copywriting-preflight	UserPromptSubmit	Interview for intent before drafting a new piece or revision

Verification hooks

Hook	Event	Description
source-attribution-check	PostToolUse	Flag unattributed quotes and claims
verification-reminder	PostToolUse	Prompt to verify facts before including
data-methodology-check	PostToolUse	Ensure data stories include methodology

Editorial workflow hooks

Hook	Event	Description
source-diversity-check	PostToolUse	Note when sources may lack diversity
legal-review-flag	PostToolUse	Flag potentially defamatory content
pre-publish-checklist	Stop	Reminder checklist before completing tasks
deadline-tracker	SessionStart	Surface upcoming deadlines

Preservation hooks

Hook	Event	Description
archive-reminder	PostToolUse	Remind to archive URLs when citing sources

Interaction hooks

Hook	Event	Purpose
prose-question-guard	Stop	Nudge prose questions into AskUserQuestion; installation and guide

Development hooks

Hook	Event	Description
one-way-door-check	PreToolUse	Block creation of files representing irreversible architectural decisions
bug-report-detector	UserPromptSubmit	Detect bug reports and remind the agent to establish the failure before fixing it
pre-commit-review	PreToolUse	Surface the staged diff for line-by-line review before a commit, and flag deletions of safety-critical guardrails
no-ai-attribution	PreToolUse	Block AI authorship credit in commits, PR bodies, and comments before they land

Skill structure

Each shared skill follows the Agent Skills standard:

skill-name/
├── SKILL.md          # Main instructions (required)
├── examples/         # Example inputs/outputs (optional)
├── templates/        # Reusable templates (optional)
└── scripts/          # Helper scripts (optional)

SKILL.md format

---
name: skill-name
description: When to use this skill and what it does
---

# Skill title

Instructions and knowledge for Claude to use.

Usage examples

Source verification

When you ask Claude to verify a claim or check a source:

"Can you help me verify this viral tweet claiming [X]?"
"What steps should I take to verify this document?"
"Help me check if this image is authentic"

Interview preparation

When preparing for interviews:

"Help me prepare questions for interviewing the mayor about the budget"
"What background research should I do before this interview?"
"Create a question framework for an investigative interview"

Story pitching

When developing story ideas:

"Help me pitch this feature story idea"
"Draft a query letter for this freelance investigation"
"What's the angle for this daily news story?"

Fact-checking

When verifying claims:

"Walk me through fact-checking this politician's statement"
"Help me document the evidence for this claim"
"What rating should this fact-check receive?"

Project documentation

When setting up or closing projects:

"Generate project instructions for this investigation project"
"Write a retrospective for the conference website we just finished"
"Which template should I use for this newsletter project?"

Social media intelligence

When investigating online narratives:

"Help me analyze this account for authenticity"
"Track how this claim is spreading across platforms"
"Check for signs of coordinated behavior"

Web archiving and monitoring

When preserving or tracking content:

"Archive this page to multiple services for redundancy"
"Set up monitoring for changes to this government page"
"Find academic papers related to this topic"

Contributing

Contributions welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full guide, skill structure, testing, and style guidelines.

Quick version: fork, create your skill with a SKILL.md frontmatter file, run npm run validate:agent-skills, test the clients affected by your change, and submit a PR.

Target audiences

• Investigative journalists - source verification, FOIA, data analysis
• Newsroom developers - scraping, data pipelines, visualization tools
• Academic researchers - writing, methodology, peer review
• Graduate students - thesis writing, literature reviews, proposals
• Communications professionals - content strategy, research methods
• Fact-checkers - verification workflows, evidence documentation
• Digital archivists - preservation, metadata, knowledge graphs
• Editors - workflow management, style enforcement, quality control

Related resources

• Anthropic official skills
• Claude Code documentation
• Codex skills documentation
• Agent Skills specification
• autopunk-media-skills, broadcast, TV, podcast, and radio production skills; complements this repo's investigative focus. Free library, paired with a paid product (autopunk.io)
• NICAR (Investigative Reporters & Editors)
• First Draft News
• Verification Handbook
• AP Stylebook
• Bellingcat OSINT guides

License

MIT License - See LICENSE for details.

Author

Joe Amditis (@jamditis)