Subtext — Development skill for Claude Code

subtext

**A Claude Skill that tells you what a message is actually saying, and shows its work.**

You got the email. You've read it four times. Something about it is off and you can't say what, so you send it to a friend and ask "am I reading too much into this?"

That question has a real answer, and it's findable. Careful messages leave marks. A standard element that's missing. Hedges clustered in one place and absent everywhere else. A question you asked that quietly didn't get answered. One flat sentence in a warm paragraph. These are things you can point at and quote, which means they can be checked.

`subtext` reads incoming messages against that evidence and sorts every finding into what's stated, what the structure supports, and what's a guess. The third category gets labeled and kept in its own box.

Then it writes the plain version. Your message with the management removed.

The part that keeps it honest

Anything that reads hidden meaning into text can turn into a machine that makes anxious people more anxious. Two rules stop that.

**No finding without a quote.** Every claim names the exact feature that produced it, and states what that feature does *not* prove. Most bad subtext reading is a real observation that grew a cause on the way to the conclusion.

**The innocent reading is mandatory.** Before anything ships, it argues the boring explanation as hard as it can. They were busy. It's a template. Legal wrote it. That's how they write to everybody. Every finding has to survive that or it gets demoted to speculation.

Which means sometimes the answer is that the email is fine and you're tired. It will say that.

Install

git clone https://github.com/MichaelDoesMarketing/subtext.git ~/.claude/skills/subtext

Or grab the packaged `.skill` file from [releases](https://github.com/MichaelDoesMarketing/subtext/releases) and install without cloning.

Try it with

"Got this rejection after four rounds. Is there anything in it or am I r