Agent Style Guide — AI skill for Claude Code

agent-style-guide

The Google developer documentation style guide, as a skill an AI coding agent can apply to your docs — plus a checker that catches the mechanical half.

$ python3 scripts/gstyle-check.py README.md

=== README.md  [mode: doc] ===
  FAIL  L34: "e.g." — use "for example" or "that is" (translates better)
  FAIL  L7: heading "What and Why" is Title Case — use sentence case
  warn  L58: "just" — "just" is usually filler; keep only if it means "only"
  2 fail, 1 warn

This is a floor, not a ceiling. Read the document.

The idea

Google's guide is excellent for what it targets: reference docs read by developers under time pressure, often non-native English speakers, often through machine translation. Its best rules improve almost any technical prose.

But a chunk of it is a documentation *house style*, not a general writing standard, and applying it to a cover letter or a blog post sands the voice out of the writing. So this skill classifies the document first and picks a mode:

Document	Mode	Result
README, runbook, API doc, spec, PR description	doc	Full ruleset
Cover letter, blog post, marketing copy, email	voice	Clarity rules only; your voice guide overrides the rest
Scratch notes	neither	It says so and stops

That routing is the point. A style checker that cannot tell the difference between a runbook and a personal essay will damage one of them.

Install

As a Claude Code skill

git clone https://github.com/mpommrehn/agent-style-guide.git
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
ln -s "$PWD/agent-style-guide" ~/.claude/skills/google-style

Then invoke it with `/google-style path/to/file.md`, or ask for a style pass in plain language.

**To make it opt-in only**, add `disable-model-invocation: true` to the frontmatter in `SKILL.md`. With that set, only you can run it, and its description stays out of the model's context entirely. Worth doing while you decide whether you trust the cla