lucid-writer

Make research writing clearer without making the evidence stronger than it is

lucid-writer is an Agent Skill for Claude Code and Codex. It edits, drafts and reviews research articles, reports, abstracts and reviewer responses. It scales from a two-sentence copyedit to a full manuscript audit.

Generic rewriting tends to turn an association into a cause while it polishes the prose. lucid-writer checks every material claim against its evidence before it changes the wording:

claim → evidence → scope → uncertainty → inference ceiling → wording

Its priorities run in this order, and a lower one never wins at the cost of a higher one:

  1. Evidence integrity
  2. Argument
  3. Reader comprehension
  4. Concision
  5. Surface polish

Before and after

Input:

Interestingly, participants with higher baseline CD161+ CD4 T-cell frequencies showed a significantly delayed time to parasitaemia (HR 0.72, 95% CI 0.55–0.95, p=0.018). Taken together, these findings demonstrate that CD161+ CD4 T cells play a crucial protective role against malaria infection.

lucid-writer:

Higher baseline CD161+ CD4 T-cell frequencies were associated with delayed parasitaemia (HR 0.72, 95% CI 0.55–0.95; p=0.018). This association is consistent with a relationship between this phenotype and parasite control but does not establish a causal protective role.

The numbers survive; the causal claim the data cannot carry does not. More cases are on the Evaluation page.

Install

Claude Code plugin

The plugin loads the skill and the three review subagents:

/plugin marketplace add mdmanurung/lucid-writer
/plugin install lucid-writer@lucid-writer

Installer script

git clone https://github.com/mdmanurung/lucid-writer
cd lucid-writer
bash scripts/install.sh both        # Claude Code and Codex

On Windows, run .\scripts\install.ps1 both. Use claude or codex instead of both for one target. The installer copies skills/lucid-writer/ and the three review subagents. Add --skill-only after the target to skip the subagents (PowerShell: -SkillOnly). It replaces any installed copy and makes no network requests.

Use the plugin or the installer, not both: together they load two copies of the skill.

By hand

Copy skills/lucid-writer/ to ~/.claude/skills/lucid-writer (Claude Code) or ~/.agents/skills/lucid-writer (Codex). For a skill scoped to one repository, copy it to .agents/skills/ there. The Codex plugin manifest ships the skill only; install.sh codex adds the subagents. Without Git, use Code → Download ZIP on GitHub and copy the same folder.

Verify

Start a new session and paste:

Use lucid-writer to tighten this paragraph without changing claim strength:
[paste a research paragraph]

Then check that it triggers on its own:

Review this Discussion for overclaiming, missing alternatives, and unnecessary repetition.

Update and uninstall

To update, run git pull, then rerun the installer. To uninstall:

rm -rf ~/.claude/skills/lucid-writer ~/.agents/skills/lucid-writer
rm -f ~/.claude/agents/lucid-*.md ~/.codex/agents/lucid_*.toml

Where next

  • How it works: the rules and how they load.
  • Use: prompts for daily work, the review subagents, project state.
  • Mycelium: writing from verified provenance in a Mycelium repository.
  • Evaluation: what has been tested, and what has not.
  • Develop: repository layout, validation, contributing.