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Agent skill

Nsdi Writing Style

by brycewang-stanford in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

A skill your agent uses when drafting or revising NSDI prose — building the operational-pain-to-design-principle arc, fitting argument and figures into 12 pages with references and appendices…

MITAuto-check passedWriting & Content

Install Nsdi Writing Style

skills CLI
$ npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill nsdi-writing-style -a claude-code

Project install by default; add -g for ~/.claude/skills/.

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills nsdi-writing-style --agent claude-code

Project scope by default; add --scope user for a personal install. Needs GitHub CLI 2.90.0 or later (public preview).

Manual copy
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills.git skills-src && mkdir -p .claude/skills && cp -r skills-src/NSDI-Skills/skills/nsdi-writing-style .claude/skills/nsdi-writing-style && rm -rf skills-src

Use ~/.claude/skills/ instead of .claude/skills for a personal install. The folder must contain SKILL.md.

Claude Code skills documentation · loads skills from .claude/skills/

Facts

Skill name
nsdi-writing-style
GitHub stars
1.2k
Token cost
~1.6k tokens
SKILL.md length
757 words
Files
1
Skills in repo
2,387
Repo updated
First seen
Licence
MIT

At a glance

A skill your agent uses when drafting or revising NSDI prose — building the operational-pain-to-design-principle arc, fitting argument and figures into 12 pages with references and appendices…

  • Works in 5 steps: Operational pain, evidenced — a failure… → Why the networked setting causes it —… → The design principle, named — the… → …
  • Revising NSDI prose — building the operational-pain-to-design-principle arc
  • SKILL.md covers The opening arc, Budget arithmetic before…, Sentence-level calibration and Anonymity constraints on prose, plus 4 more sections
  • Instructions only: no scripts, shell commands, URLs or credentials in SKILL.md

What it does

Nsdi Writing Style is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when drafting or revising NSDI prose — building the operational-pain-to-design-principle arc, fitting argument and figures into 12 pages with references and appendices outside the cap, calibrating claims to trace and testbed evidence, and writing for reviewers who read tail percentiles before adjectives.

Its SKILL.md is about 1.6k tokens, which your agent loads only when the skill is triggered. It is a single SKILL.md file with no bundled scripts.

It sits in Writing & Content, covering Brand voice and tone. The repository describes itself as: Journal-specific Claude Code/Codex skill packs covering mainstream journals — AER, QJE, Nature, Cell, 管理世界, 经济研究 & 200+ more — your fast track to getting published. ｜ 覆盖主流期刊的… The licence is MIT.

When your agent uses it

  • Revising NSDI prose — building the operational-pain-to-design-principle arc
  • Fitting argument and figures into 12 pages with references and appendices outside the cap
  • Calibrating claims to trace and testbed evidence
  • Writing for reviewers who read tail percentiles before adjectives

Example prompts

  • “/nsdi-writing-style”

Workflow steps

5 steps, taken from the first numbered list in SKILL.md.

  1. Operational pain, evidenced — a failure shape, cost, or limit shown in a trace
  2. Why the networked setting causes it — the distributed or stack-level reason
  3. The design principle, named — the transferable idea, stated so another team
  4. The built system — what was implemented, where it runs, what was not built.
  5. Claims with evidence addresses — each headline number tied to a section, a

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 932eb23. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

  • Tool permissions

    Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

    From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

  • Runs code

    No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md.

    From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

  • Network

    No URLs in SKILL.md.

    From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

  • Credentials

    Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

    From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Nsdi Writing Style loads about 1.6k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 82 tokens; SKILL.md has 757 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~82
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~1.6k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Auto-check passed

The automated check found no risky patterns in SKILL.md.

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills at commit 932eb23, republished under its MIT licence (© brycewang-stanford). 757 words, ~1,625 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/nsdi-writing-style/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder).
name
nsdi-writing-style
description
Use when drafting or revising NSDI prose — building the operational-pain-to-design-principle arc, fitting argument and figures into 12 pages with references and appendices outside the cap, calibrating claims to trace and testbed evidence, and writing for reviewers who read tail percentiles before adjectives.

NSDI Writing Style

An NSDI paper argues that a nameable design idea, embodied in a working networked system, holds up under realistic traffic. The prose exists to make that chain checkable. Format facts below are the NSDI '27 CFP as rendered on 2026-07-08.

The opening arc

NSDI first pages that work tend to execute five beats in order (see the rebuilt example in ../../resources/worked-examples/01-introduction.md):

  1. Operational pain, evidenced — a failure shape, cost, or limit shown in a trace or deployment, not asserted from intuition.
  2. Why the networked setting causes it — the distributed or stack-level reason local fixes fail. This beat is also the scope defense; a paper that cannot write it is drifting out of the CFP's "design of networked systems or the networking stack."
  3. The design principle, named — the transferable idea, stated so another team could apply it to a different system.
  4. The built system — what was implemented, where it runs, what was not built.
  5. Claims with evidence addresses — each headline number tied to a section, a workload, and a percentile.

Budget arithmetic before sentence polish

The '27 rule: 12 pages including footnotes, figures, and tables; references and appendices may extend beyond. Two consequences shape the writing:

  • Figures are inside the cap, so every plot pays rent. Cut the third bar chart saying "ours is faster again"; keep the breakdown that explains why.
  • Appendices exist but are overflow, not annex: reviewers judge the 12 pages. Nothing load-bearing (a baseline, the key workload description, a correctness argument) may live only past the references (nsdi-supplementary).

A workable allocation for a 12-page systems paper:

SectionPagesJob
Intro + motivation measurement2 - 2.5Beats 1-3 with data
Design3 - 3.5Principle → mechanism → interfaces; failure handling explicit
Implementation0.5 - 1What exists, LoC/frameworks, honest deltas from design
Evaluation3.5 - 4Questions answered, not benchmarks toured
Related work + discussion1 - 1.5Positioning + stated limits

Sentence-level calibration

Systems reviewers at this venue distrust superlatives and read distributions. Editing passes that consistently improve NSDI drafts:

  • Replace every "up to N×" with the percentile, workload, and range: "2.1-3.4× at p99.9 on the replayed incident weeks."
  • Replace "significantly / dramatically / novel" with the measured delta or the named mechanism. Adjectives signal missing numbers.
  • Convert passive mechanism descriptions into agent-explicit ones — which component decides, on what signal, at what timescale.
  • State the boundary honestly, in the body: the regime where the design loses (incast, single replica, cold caches). NSDI culture treats a named limitation as competence, and an unnamed one found by a reviewer as concealment.
  • Keep terminology bijective: one name per component, one component per name, figures and text agreeing exactly.
text
Weak:  "Our novel scheduler significantly reduces latency (up to 4.1x)
        compared to state-of-the-art approaches."
NSDI:  "Shifting retries off congested paths cuts p99.9 latency 2.1-3.4x
        vs tuned exponential backoff across the three incident classes
        (§6.2); gains vanish when RTT < the lease renewal interval (§7)."
Show full SKILL.md (322 more words)Show less

Anonymity constraints on prose

Double-blind shapes phrasing, with one NSDI-specific fork: research-track papers neutralize identifying deployment details ("a large provider's fleet"), while operational-track papers may keep real system and company names with author names still withheld. Write self-citations in the third person; never delete a reference to hide identity; cite a concurrent NSDI submission as "Under submission. Details omitted for double-blind reviewing." The CFP endorses AI tools for grammar and clarity of human-written text — the ideas, and the responsibility, stay human.

Revision-letter prose (one-shot resubmissions)

A resubmitted revision is read by the same reviewers against their own issue list, so the writing task inverts: instead of impressing a stranger, show a known reader that each demanded change exists. Keep new text visually traceable — the auxiliary change-highlighted PDF must let a reviewer jump from issue to fix in seconds (nsdi-author-response). Prose that quietly rewrites unrelated sections invites re-litigation of settled points.

Figures as argument, not decoration

Because figures bill against the 12 pages, each one should be designed like a paragraph with a topic sentence:

  • Caption states the takeaway ("Leases cap retry amplification at 1.3× during all three incident classes"), not the axes ("Latency vs. time").
  • One visual idea per figure; a plot needing three sentences of legend explanation is two plots or zero.
  • CDFs for distribution claims, timelines for dynamic behavior, breakdowns for "why" claims — the form should match the claim type (nsdi-experiments).
  • Readability at print scale: systems reviewers annotate paper printouts; 6-point axis labels get skipped, and a skipped figure is a page of rent paid for nothing.

Self-edit checklist

  • First page executes all five beats; a stranger can quote the design principle.
  • Every claim has an evidence address (section + workload + metric).
  • No superlative survives without a number; tails reported where tails matter.
  • Failure regimes named in the body, not confessed in the appendix.
  • 12-page count verified on the built PDF, figures included.
  • Anonymization style matches the declared track.

Output format

text
[Arc check] beats 1-5 present? weakest beat + fix
[Budget] pages by section vs allocation; what to cut first
[Calibration] list of unbacked superlatives / missing percentiles
[Boundary] named failure regimes: <list or MISSING>
[Track-consistent anonymity] research-neutralized / operational-named
[Edit order] highest-leverage rewrite first

© brycewang-stanford, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

Just SKILL.md in NSDI-Skills/skills/nsdi-writing-style of brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills.

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 932eb23

Compare with similar skills

Nsdi Writing Style next to the 5 skills that share the most tags, products or categories with it. Stars are the repository's; “used in” counts other GitHub owners with a copy.

Nsdi Writing Style compared with similar skills
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BrandOhh-889/skyroc79513 repos~733Automated safety check: PassMIT
Khazix WeChat Article WriterKKKKhazix/khazix-skills21k1 repos~2.9kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Writing Guidelinesvercel-labs/agent-skills32k7 repos~309Automated safety check: PassNone
Unslop AI Writing Cleanuptheclaymethod/unslop518—~1.7kAutomated safety check: PassMIT

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Categories

Questions about Nsdi Writing Style

What does Nsdi Writing Style do?

A skill your agent uses when drafting or revising NSDI prose — building the operational-pain-to-design-principle arc, fitting argument and figures into 12 pages with references and appendices…. Nsdi Writing Style is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when drafting or revising NSDI prose — building the operational-pain-to-design-principle arc, fitting argument and figures into 12 pages with references and appendices outside the cap, calibrating claims to trace and testbed evidence, and writing for reviewers who read tail percentiles before adjectives.

When should I use Nsdi Writing Style?

Nsdi Writing Style fits situations like: revising NSDI prose — building the operational-pain-to-design-principle arc; fitting argument and figures into 12 pages with references and appendices outside the cap; calibrating claims to trace and testbed evidence; writing for reviewers who read tail percentiles before adjectives.

How do I install Nsdi Writing Style in Claude Code?

Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill nsdi-writing-style -a claude-code`. Or copy the skill folder (NSDI-Skills/skills/nsdi-writing-style in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) into .claude/skills/nsdi-writing-style in your project. Claude Code loads it when a task matches its description.

How do I install Nsdi Writing Style in Codex?

Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill nsdi-writing-style -a codex`. Or copy the skill folder (NSDI-Skills/skills/nsdi-writing-style in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) into .agents/skills/nsdi-writing-style in your project. Codex loads it when a task matches its description.

Can I use Nsdi Writing Style in Cursor, Gemini CLI or GitHub Copilot?

Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode also load SKILL.md folders. With the skills CLI, run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill nsdi-writing-style -a cursor` (or -a gemini-cli, github-copilot or opencode for the others). To copy it by hand, put the folder in .cursor/skills/nsdi-writing-style, .gemini/skills/nsdi-writing-style, .github/skills/nsdi-writing-style and .opencode/skills/nsdi-writing-style in your project.

What does Nsdi Writing Style need to run?

SKILL.md names no scripts, command-line tools or credentials: Nsdi Writing Style is instructions for the agent only.

Does Nsdi Writing Style access the network?

SKILL.md contains no URLs. Any network use would come from the scripts or tools the agent runs. This is read from the text; nothing was executed.

Is Nsdi Writing Style safe to install?

Our automated static check of SKILL.md found no risky patterns, such as piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files or hidden Unicode. It is not a guarantee. Review the folder before installing.

What licence does Nsdi Writing Style use?

Nsdi Writing Style is published under the MIT licence (the repository's licence). It allows redistribution, so the full SKILL.md is shown on this page.

How many tokens does Nsdi Writing Style use?

About 1.6k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 6.5k characters). Agents keep only the skill's name and description in context until a task matches; then they load SKILL.md in full.

What are the alternatives to Nsdi Writing Style?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with Nsdi Writing Style: Avoid AI Writing (conorbronsdon/avoid-ai-writing, 4.9k stars), Brand (Ohh-889/skyroc, 795 stars), Khazix WeChat Article Writer (KKKKhazix/khazix-skills, 21k stars) and Writing Guidelines (vercel-labs/agent-skills, 32k stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains Nsdi Writing Style?

brycewang-stanford (a GitHub user) maintains it in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, which has 1,231 GitHub stars. The repository holds 2,387 skills in this directory. The repository was last updated on September 27, 2026.

Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills on GitHub. Facts on this page come from the repository at the commit we read; the author's words are quoted as theirs.