The email-writer skill: send the email you've been avoiding

Some emails sit in your head for a week: the invoice that's five weeks late, the friend who wants a discount you can't give, the third follow-up to someone who went quiet in April. You know what you want to say. You just can't find the tone, so you don't send it.

That's what the email-writer skill is for. You tell it the situation in one line, answer three quick questions, and it hands back a subject line and a body under 150 words with the ask sitting on line two or three, where somebody will actually read it. It also gives you a softer and a firmer version of that one risky line, so you can swap it without rewriting anything.

It's one of the 55 free skills we keep in the freeskills repo. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to pay for, no keys to wire in.

A skill is a folder Claude Code reads and turns into a slash command. You copy the folder into your skills directory and you're done. Three lines in your terminal:

Restart Claude Code, or just open a new session. That's the whole install. No API keys, no config.

Type /email-writer and say in one sentence what the email is. It sorts your situation into a type, chasing money, saying no, apologizing, asking for more, the third follow-up, or bad news, and it tells you which one it picked. Then it asks three questions and stops: who this person is to you, what you want to happen after they read it, and how blunt you can be.

Next it asks for the facts it can't make up. Amounts, dates, an invoice number, what was promised. If you don't have one handy, it writes [FILL IN] in the draft instead of inventing a number. That's what you want from anything writing an email with your name on it.

A good first result: a plain subject line like "Invoice 104, now 5 weeks overdue", a body of three or four short paragraphs, the ask by line three, and two swap lines at the bottom. It saves the whole thing to ~/emails/ with today's date in the filename, and tells you the path.

The most common one, and the one people write worst. Fill in the brackets and paste it straight in.

The trick is telling the skill up front that you don't want a compromise. Otherwise you'll get a maybe dressed up as a no.

Two emails, no reply, and now you're wondering if you're being annoying. Give it the dates and tell it what a win looks like.

Here's what the skill does and why it matters, in the version you'd say out loud.

1. 1Hook: there's a brand-new free Claude skill that takes you from an email you've been avoiding for nine days to a draft you can send in five minutes.
2. 2Mechanism: you hand it the email you've been avoiding. It asks three questions, who this person is to you, what you want to happen after they read it, and how blunt you can be. Then it writes the whole thing with one clear ask near the top, and gives you a softer and a harder version of that ask so you can pick the one that sounds like you.
3. 3Transformation: the email goes out tonight. The invoice gets a date on it. The thing you've been carrying around all week stops taking up room in your head.
4. 4Close: free, and there are 54 more like it in the same repo. When the emails start being about work you're charging properly for, that's Claude Code Club, $9 a month. Link below.

Pick the email you've been avoiding the longest. Install the skill, run it, fill in the brackets, send it tonight. Nothing about a hard email gets easier by sitting overnight.