Patrick McKenzie (patio11) has written for years about a register he calls the Dangerous Professional. It came out of his consulting work with banks and fintech, where he sat on both sides of the glass: institutions trained to deflect, and customers trying to get money back, fix billing errors, dispute charges, recover deposits. The voice is the one you use when you write to a bank, a regulator, a company that owes you something. Calm. Formal. Cites the policy by section. Names the deadline. Never threatens. The email reads like it could come from someone with a lawyer, without ever saying so.
Patrick McKenzie@patio11
I’d grade this an A. (Memetically, being a Dangerous Professional means communicating in what might be a slightly adversarial context in a way which suggests that a bureaucracy take one’s concerns seriously and escalate them to someone empowered to resolve them swiftly.)
Filippo Valsorda @filippo.abyssdomain.expert @FiloSottile
Hey @patio11, how's my Dangerous Professional interpretation?
3:08 AM · Aug 17, 2019
2 Replies · 28 Reposts · 271 Likes
Patio11’s framing: institutions sit inside a tower of assumed competence, and the people inside respond very differently to messages that sound like they came from inside the tower. He’s used it himself — and helped friends use it — to reverse fraudulent charges, recover wrongly withheld funds, fix medical billing errors, push back on denied insurance claims. The skill is partly the script — what to cite, what to ask for, when to escalate — and partly the register itself, which signals you’re not going to go away. Most people never learn any of this. Some pick it up from family or work; most learn it the hard way, after they’ve already lost the dispute by sounding too angry or too hopeful.
I’ve been developing a sort of meta-plugin: a framework for automating the creation of new agent plugins. It works as a consultant. It interviews me about the problem, makes me point at references for what good looks like, refuses to autonomously hunt for examples (it’d just codify whatever bad patterns it finds), and routes the work to the right extension point. The meta-plugin is built from several deep research dumps on best practices for plugin writing, plus my own curated experience and that of power users in my network.
For this plugin specifically, I ran automated research dumps from a curated list of links where patio11 has talked about Dangerous Professional, and fed that into the meta-plugin. The meta-plugin compiled it into a new skill purpose-built for dangerous-professional. I handed that skill to Claude in a single plan session and let it build the thing.
This was a trial for automated skill development. It went far enough that I want to develop this into a regular framework to latch onto.
I’ve been using it on:
Contractors working on my house
Banks and SaaS support teams fighting overage charges, billing issues and bugs
Most impactfully, on my home insurance provider after a historic hail storm destroyed roofs across the metro area, including ours.
Context dump the situation and all the supporting data into the agent. State what you actually want as an ideal outcome.
Then ask the agent for feedback on the goal itself. Most of the time you’re wrong about what you’re asking for, or your aims are more emotional than they need to be.
Workshop a few framings for the real goal. Pick one.
Have it write the email.
Patio11 on the Dangerous Professional
Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You (2017) — the canonical long-form piece. The voice in action across credit bureaus, banks, and the police.
Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012) — the register applied to compensation.
Talking About Money (2015) — the cultural and class dimensions of the register.
The defining tweet: “Memetically, being a Dangerous Professional means communicating in what might be a slightly adversarial context in a way which suggests that a bureaucracy take one’s concerns seriously and escalate them to someone empowered to resolve them swiftly.”
@patio11 on X — ongoing threads.
Bits About Money — his current newsletter.
Podcasts
Complex Systems — patio11’s own show. DP-adjacent material runs through it.
The plugin
Source: github.com/Tetra-Research/dangerous-professional-plugin
Install:
npx skills add Tetra-Research/dangerous-professional-plugin