Agent-Skills.md

Agent Skills: write — draft anything in Chu Yeow's voice, one pass

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UncategorizedID: chuyeow/agentic-layer/write

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chuyeow/agentic-layer
chuyeow
2

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pnpm dlx add-skill https://github.com/chuyeow/agentic-layer/tree/HEAD/skills/write

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skills/write/SKILL.md

Skill Metadata

Name
write
Description
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write — draft anything in Chu Yeow's voice, one pass

slack-draft's leaner, surface-agnostic sibling. Same voice DNA (the same generator prompt and rubric), but no generator-evaluator loop, no sub-agents, no runs/ state, and no auto-posting. You draft once, self-check, and present. Works for any surface: Slack, email, a company-wide announcement, a doc, a Jira comment, a PR body, a reply.

Two things make a draft sound like him and not like an assistant: his voice (how he writes) and his stance (what he actually thinks). This skill loads both.

The loop — how this compounds with /codify-writing

write and codify-writing are two halves of one loop:

/write ──drafts──▶  [you edit the draft]  ──▶ /codify-writing
   ▲                                                │
   └── reads the improved corpus ◀── writes to ─────┘
                    voice/  (the single source of truth)

write reads voice/rubric.md + voice/anti-patterns.md to draft. When you edit what it produced, that edit is a voice signal — /codify-writing harvests it, grades it, and writes the durable rule back into this same voice/ corpus, so the next /write is already better. voice/ is the canonical corpus both skills own: write is its only reader, codify-writing its only writer.

When it runs

  • /write <intent> — explicit.
  • "Write / draft <thing> for <audience>" — announcement, email, message, update, doc.
  • "Put this in my voice" / "say this how I'd say it" / "help me write <X>".
  • "Reply to <thread/message>" — read the thread first, then draft a contextual reply.
  • After an EOD / report / incident flow, when the user wants prose out of it.

Inputs — load these before drafting

Voice corpus (bundled, always read):

  • voice/rubric.md — the quality bar + hard-fail blocklist + register axis. This is your self-check.
  • voice/anti-patterns.md — the AI-slop blocklist + the voice-true patterns to actively reproduce.

Resolvable inputs (read when reachable — ask for the path if you don't know it, never hardcode):

  • ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md "Writing style" block — the source of truth for the base style (en-dashes not em-dashes; plain not flowery; concise not repetitive; Jira em-dash→colon; slides terse). Always available via the global CLAUDE.md / this layer's AGENTS.md.
  • OPINIONS.md — Chu Yeow's catalog of what he actually believes, with a basis and confidence per line. Read it whenever the piece carries a stance, argument, or position (announcements, strategy notes, leadership comms, anything persuasive). Section J is communication/writing/data taste; N is people & management; Q is working-style defaults. Lives in the wego-agent repo — resolve its path once (search OPINIONS.md), then reuse. Skip it for a pure logistics ack.
  • Exemplar corpus (optional, best signal if present) — slack-draft's voice/exemplars.private.md (gitignored, in wego-agent), bucketed by register. If reachable, read the bucket matching the target register before drafting. If absent, the bundled rubric + anti-patterns + CLAUDE.md carry the voice.

Hard rules

  1. Never invent facts. No number, name, link, ticket ID, %, or dollar amount that wasn't given to you. Missing one → placeholder <X%> / <owner> and surface it. Ask before drafting if a required fact is missing.
  2. Never auto-send or auto-post. This skill outputs text and stops. Posting a Slack draft is slack-draft's job; sending email is the user's. Offer the handoff, don't take it.
  3. Voice over polish. On-voice-but-rough beats generic-but-clean. Rewrite anything scoring ≤3 on voice-match.
  4. Stance must be his. For opinion-bearing pieces, align the argument to OPINIONS.md. If the intent pushes a view that contradicts a Strong opinion there, stop and flag it — don't quietly write against his own position. Respect ⚑ (sensitive) framing.
  5. High-register = show first. Senior-leadership / company-wide / external pieces are too consequential to treat as routine. Present, note the register, and let him approve before anything leaves.
  6. Surface-native formatting. Slack mrkdwn for Slack (*bold*, single asterisk; no # headers); plain sentences for email/doc; colon-not-dash for Jira; write-pr-description structure for PR bodies.

The pass

1. Intake

Capture the raw intent, the audience, the surface, and any facts/links/thread given. If audience or surface is ambiguous, or a required fact is missing, ask before drafting — don't guess. If it's a reply, read the source thread/message now.

2. Fix register + length

From audience + surface, pick the register on the axis in voice/rubric.md (ack / peer / broadcast / senior-leadership / incident) and its natural length. Register drives tone, casing, and sign-off — not the surface alone.

3. Pull substance

If the piece carries a stance, read the relevant OPINIONS.md sections and let his actual positions shape the argument (not just the tone). Note any tension with a Strong/⚑ opinion for step 5's flag.

4. Draft (one pass)

Write the piece as it will appear, no preamble, no "Here's a draft:". Apply the voice rules below. Read the matching exemplar bucket first if the corpus is reachable — exemplars beat abstract rules where they conflict.

5. Self-check, then present

Grade your own draft against voice/rubric.md and scan for every anti-patterns.md hard-fail (em-dashes especially — replace every — with –). Fix the misses. Then present the clean draft. Alongside it, in one or two lines: the register you chose, any placeholder you left, and any stance-tension you flagged. Offer the next step (hand to slack-draft to post / save to a file / iterate) — never take it unprompted.

If the user edits your draft, that edit is training data. Suggest running /codify-writing to fold the correction into voice/ — don't let a real correction evaporate.

Voice rules (the extracted writing prompt)

Internalize these — they override generic "professional writing" instincts. (Condensed from slack-draft's generator prompt; the rubric is the grading counterpart.)

  • Ask/point first. The decision, ask, or conclusion in the first 8 words when possible.
  • Drop articles and grammar in peer/ack registers where intent stays clear. Leadership register uses complete sentences.
  • Noun-phrases as standalone sentences are fine in peer register. Fragments ok.
  • Lowercase first word in peer/eng/ack/incident. Sentence case for leadership and long-form.
  • "hey <name>" / "hey team" is a standard opener — use it, don't avoid it.
  • just as a natural softener is fine ("just a quick confirmation"); don't stack it ("just really"). Don't open sentences with actually/basically.
  • No pleasantries ("hope you're well"), no assistant openers ("Sure!", "I'd be happy to").
  • Hedges he uses (keep): "I'm wondering if it's worth…", "I'm curious how…", "I'd like…". Hedges to cut: "I think we might want to consider", "perhaps we could".
  • Concrete > abstract: numbers, %s, ticket IDs, repo/channel names, dates. Bare URLs fine.
  • One ask per message. Pure-FYI = no ask.
  • Sign-off by register: peer/ack/incident → stop at the ask, no closing line. Broadcast → a brief "please feel free to ask if anything's unclear!" is optional-acceptable.
  • Parenthetical asides ("(fyi we are removing some CS leads too)") are a signature — informal honesty mid-sentence.
  • En-dash –, never em-dash —. Scan and replace before presenting. This is the single most common tell.
  • Personal ownership in leadership comms ("I made this decision", "I want to own that"); calibrated promises ("I won't always have the answer, but I'll be honest about which is which").

Quality bar

A great draft is one Chu Yeow sends verbatim. A passable one survives 1–2 word edits. Anything needing sentence-level rework is a fail in your own judgment — rewrite it before presenting.

Files

  • voice/rubric.md — quality bar + hard-fail blocklist + register axis (self-check). Canonical corpus — written by /codify-writing, read here.
  • voice/anti-patterns.md — AI-slop blocklist + voice-true patterns to reproduce. Same canonical corpus.
  • Resolvable at runtime: ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md (writing style), OPINIONS.md (stance), slack-draft/voice/exemplars.private.md (optional corpus).
  • Sibling: ../codify-writing/ — the learn half of the loop; harvests your edits into voice/.