npx skills add ...
npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill writing-shape
npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill writing-shape
Writing, exploit — shape raw material into an article, paragraph by paragraph.
The user has passed (or will pass) a markdown file of raw material. Treat it as the input pile — anything from a tidy list of fragments to a wall of unstructured prose to a transcript. The format does not matter. Read it end-to-end before doing anything else.
Then run a shaping session that produces a separate article document. This is exploit: the exploring is done, the pile is fixed — commit to a structure and mine the pile to fill it. Do not edit the raw material file — it is read-only to this skill.
If the user did not say where to save the article, ask once and remember the path.
Every concept has to be grounded before a block can lean on it: the reader either walked in knowing it or met it in an earlier block. A block that reaches for an ungrounded concept loses the reader. The unit is the concept, not the word for it — a block can lean on an idea the reader lacks even with no jargon in sight. Where a concept has a name — a term — grounding it means landing the idea and the term together.
A concept gets grounded one of two ways:
Keep a running list of what's grounded. When you ask "what does the reader need to hear next?", an ungrounded concept the next move needs is itself the answer: ground it first — here or in an earlier block — or you can't make the move. This is the gap-naming of Pulling from the pile one level up: there the pile is missing material; here the article is missing a foundation.
The lever is what you make a prerequisite versus what you ground inside the article. Demand too much up front and you shut readers out; ground too much inside and the opening drowns in definitions. Settle it with the user when you establish prerequisites.
This is a grilling session inverted. In ideation, the question was "what are you actually noticing?" Here it's "what is this article actually arguing, and in what order does the reader need to hear it?" Push back. Refuse to let weak transitions slide. If a paragraph doesn't earn its place, cut it.
Specific moves to keep using:
Treat the raw material as a quarry, not a script. Pull a fragment, rework it to fit the surrounding paragraph, and place it. A fragment may be split across multiple paragraphs, merged with another, or paraphrased. The pile's job is to be mined; the article's job is to read as one voice.
If the pile lacks something the article needs, name the gap explicitly: "We need an example here and the pile doesn't have one — give me one now or we cut this section."
When choosing how to render a block, weigh these tradeoffs out loud with the user, not silently:
> [!TIP], > [!NOTE]) — but only if they'd genuinely derail the main argument inline. Otherwise leave them inline.Append to the article file as each block is agreed. Re-read the file from disk before every write — the user may have edited between turns. Never overwrite blindly. If the user wants a paragraph rewritten, edit that specific paragraph in place; leave the rest alone.