writing-guidelines

Writing Guidelines

Writing Guidelines is Vercel's agent skill for docs review: the agent checks your pages against Vercel's Writing Guidelines and lists each style or tone issue by file and line.

Agent skill by Vercel Official · Updated October 2, 2026

Install Writing Guidelines

Install this skill with the skills CLI

Terminal

npx skills add vercel-labs/agent-skills --skill writing-guidelines

Or install every Vercel skill at once

Terminal

npx skills add vercel-labs/agent-skills

Or paste this into your coding agent: Install the agent skill writing-guidelines from github.com/vercel-labs/agent-skills. A skill can include scripts that run on your computer, so read its source first.

What Writing Guidelines does

Writing Guidelines is Vercel's skill for reviewing documentation and other prose against its Writing Guidelines, a rule set kept in a separate Vercel repository. It loads when you ask an agent to review your docs, check writing style, audit prose, review voice and tone, or check a page against the writing handbook. You pass a file or a file pattern; with none, the agent asks which files to review.

Before each Writing Guidelines review the agent fetches the latest guidelines from GitHub, so the rules are not stored in the skill and the agent needs web access. The current rules include content type, voice and tone, banned words, concision, headings, structure, lists, code, placeholders, units, punctuation and links, plus signs of AI-generated text such as recap transitions and choppy sentences. Findings come back grouped by file in a short file:line format.

When to use Writing Guidelines

You wrote a docs page and want its voice, tone and structure checked before you publish.
You want AI-drafted docs cleared of recap transitions, choppy sentences and other tells.
You want style issues listed with file and line numbers so you can fix them one by one.

When to pick something else

You want UI code reviewed: use Web Design Guidelines.
You are drafting a new doc from scratch: Doc Co-Authoring guides the writing itself.

Which agents Writing Guidelines works in

Vercel documents Writing Guidelines for any AI coding agent that reads Agent Skills, installed with the skills CLI. The open skills CLI also installs it into 78 agents, including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode (we listed it with the CLI on October 1, 2026). See where each agent looks for skills.

The SKILL.md tells the agent to use WebFetch, Claude Code's fetch tool, and declares an argument hint for Claude Code's slash command. Any agent that can fetch a URL can follow it.