Cover Letter and Assignment Request (NIH) Agent Skill

Draft the NIH cover letter and PHS Assignment Request Form — institute/center assignment preferences, study section targeting, needed…

Context cost
1.7k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 6.8 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
not declarednone named by its author
Last change
—no release on file
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Draft the NIH cover letter and PHS Assignment Request Form — institute/center assignment preferences, study section targeting, needed reviewer expertise, and reviewer exclusions. Use whenever the user mentions a cover letter, assignment request, study section choice or request, CSR referral, which institute to target, excluding a reviewer, competing labs on a panel, or reviewer expertise, typically as the application nears submission.

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

productivity

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md6.8 kB · preview
--- name: grant-cover-letter-assignment ---
6# Cover Letter and Assignment Request (NIH)
7
8Two documents PIs routinely conflate, with different audiences and rules. The **PHS Assignment Request Form** carries all assignment preferences — institute/center, study section, reviewer exclusions, needed expertise — and is read only by referral and scientific review staff, never by reviewers. The **cover letter** is for administrative matters only (late submission explanation, changed/corrected applications, prior-approval documentation for $500K+ direct costs in any year, and similar); assignment requests placed there instead of the form is the classic error. Both are optional, both are worth doing deliberately: assignment is where an application can land in front of the right audience or the wrong one, and it is decided before any reviewer reads a word.
9
10Read _agent/project-config.md first. The cover letter is a submitted document with no other component folder: its working copy and checkpoints go to 08_final_assembly/; the assignment-request worksheet goes to _agent/notes/. This skill runs near the end — the expertise and exclusion content should be extracted from the *final* aims and Approach — but the study-section choice itself belongs early (see below). Apply _agent/style-profile.md to every sentence of document text, and before delivering drafted or revised prose check it against the profile's *Directives* list item by item, counting any punctuation the profile constrains rather than estimating (shared convention 5).
11
12## Choose the study section early, finalize the request late
13
14The target study section shapes how the proposal should be written — framing, aims emphasis, how much methods detail reviewers will expect — so make the choice around the aims stage and record it in the config (Target study section / IC). If the user arrives here without one, help choose now and note the late-choice risk factually. Ways to ground the choice:
15
16- **NIH RePORTER**: search funded projects closest to this proposal and see which study sections reviewed them — the highest-signal evidence, since it shows where similar science actually succeeds.
17- **CSR study section descriptions**: match the proposal's core questions to the section's stated scope; a proposal at the boundary of two sections is worth an explicit request.
18- **CSR's Assisted Referral Tool (ART)** suggests sections from abstract text — offer it to the user as a cross-check.
19- **The program officer**: encourage the user to ask — POs know where applications like this one get traction, and the conversation builds a relationship that matters later.
20
21When the config names a target section, check the roster too: CSR publishes standing-member rosters, and a membership profile (_agent/notes/study-section-profile.md, built by grant-mock-review or here — whichever runs first, dated because rosters change) sharpens two fields below: the panel's expertise gaps feed **needed expertise**, and roster members with directly competing work feed the exclusion conversation. grant-mock-review uses the same profile to ground its personas in the panel's real composition — note this handoff.
22
23## The Assignment Request Form, field by field
24
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md999 words
Files1
Licencenot declared
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈120
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
1,580
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
0.85%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 9% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

1.7k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Middling. Fine to keep on in a project where you use it weekly, worth unloading in one where you never do.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

1 file, 6.8 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md6.8 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 1 file you can review in full before installing.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Cover Letter and Assignment Request (NIH) · 1.7k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/cover-letter-and-assignment-request-nih/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/cover-letter-and-assignment-request-nih" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/cover-letter-and-assignment-request-nih ] || { mv .claude/skills/cover-letter-and-assignment-request-nih "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/cover-letter-and-assignment-request-nih" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/cover-letter-and-assignment-request-nih"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add joshua-d-campbell/cover-letter-and-assignment-request-nih

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/cover-letter-and-assignment-request-nih/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/cover-letter-and-assignment-request-nih/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/cover-letter-and-assignment-request-nih" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/cover-letter-and-assignment-request-nih ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/cover-letter-and-assignment-request-nih "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/cover-letter-and-assignment-request-nih" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/cover-letter-and-assignment-request-nih" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/cover-letter-and-assignment-request-nih/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where. It appears as grant-cover-letter-assignment in Gemini CLI, Codex, Copilot and Grok (its own name); Claude Code lists it by the folder name, cover-letter-and-assignment-request-nih.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Versionnot versioned
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencejoshua-d-campbell/cover-letter-and-assignment-request-nih

Versions

Its author publishes no version number, so there is nothing here to pin to: what you install is the folder as it stands today. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

Pinning

Nothing to pin to: this skill carries no version number of its own. What you install is what the folder holds on the day you install it.

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