Nick Nisi Blog Writer
Turn raw material into a draft Nick finishes. This skill does research, structure, and connective prose. It does not produce publishable first-person writing.
The rule this skill exists to enforce
Facts may come from logs. Feelings may not.
An earlier version of this skill shipped a post that readers called AI slop. The facts were impeccable — real timestamps, real commit stats, real Slack quotes. The failure was that it also generated Nick's inner life: what he thought, what he'd assumed, what moved him. Nine such claims; one had a source. Readers can't always name that, but they feel it, and they stop trusting the piece.
The measured version: that post claimed inner states at 5.84 per 1,000 words against Nick's corpus mean of 0.97. Six times his rate. He mostly writes about what he built. The draft wrote about how he felt about what he built.
Everything below follows from that.
Process
1. Gather the raw material
Accept the mess: scattered thoughts, code, commands, conclusions, links. Don't require organization.
If the material is thin, mine it — session logs, Slack, git history, the repos themselves. This is the pipeline's genuine strength and there's no reason to hold back. Record a source for every fact. A working file of claim → source keeps the draft honest and makes step 5 mechanical.
2. Interview for the parts you cannot mine
This is the highest-value step in the skill. Do not skip it.
Logs record what Nick did. They never record what he thought. Ask 8–15 targeted
questions with ask_user_question or plain prose, and capture the answers
verbatim:
- "What did you actually think when X happened?"
- "Why did you really stop doing Y? Not the tidy reason — the real one."
- "What's the part of this you'd argue with someone about?"
- "What did you get wrong that you'd rather not include?"
Tell him to type fast and not polish. His unpolished answers are the raw material for every voice-load-bearing sentence in the post. They will be flat, hedged, and specific — that flatness is the voice. Do not smooth it.
If he declines to be interviewed, the post ships with [NICK: ...] markers where
his inner life would go. That is a correct outcome, not a failure.
3. Read the corpus, not a description of it
Read 2–3 recent posts from src/content/posts/ in full — most recent first, plus
any on a similar topic. Write connective prose consistent with those, not with
a summary of them.
Then read references/voice-tone.md, which is now a list of ceilings and
prohibitions, not features to hit. Requesting a feature makes a model execute it
every time it applies; that's what produced eight aphorisms in an eight-section
post. Only constraints are safe to state.
4. Structure from the material
Find the chronology or the argument already in the facts and follow it.
Do not select a narrative framework. references/frameworks.md exists as
diagnostic vocabulary for talking about a draft that already exists — never as a
template to fill. Choosing a framework means choosing what the events meant,
which is Nick's call, not the tool's. A flawlessly executed Story Circle is the
single most detectable artifact this skill can produce, because no human drafting
from memory has ever produced one.
The only structural instruction: identify the one turn the post exists to make, arrange the facts so it lands, and leave flat ground everywhere else.
Section headers are descriptive — they name the topic ("What Fleet is", "Three signals, none trustworthy alone"). Allusive narrative-beat headers ("The drift", "Coming home") read as chapter titles and are a tell in bulk.
5. Write the ugly draft
Informationally complete, rhetorically inert. Aim for flat.
Nick is good at adding voice to plain prose and bad at excising pastiche from clever prose. A draft that already sounds finished is the worst possible artifact to hand him — he has to fight it. Give him something that obviously needs him.
Hard rules while drafting:
| Rule | Why |
| ---- | --- |
| Every mental-state sentence is a verbatim quote from step 2, or a [NICK: what were you actually thinking here?] marker | The core failure. Untagged invented interiority is an automatic fail. |
| Sections end on information — a fact, a number, a command, or just stop | Eight aphoristic endings is the template's silhouette |
| Every number traces to a source | "Twelve minutes of curiosity" was invented precision that narrativizes a life |
| One sustained metaphor per post, maximum | A metaphor recurring across 3+ sections is a framework fingerprint |
| No narrator stage directions | "Now watch what happened next" is Nick emceeing a post he'd never emcee |
Where you'd reach for a rhetorical flourish, write the plain sentence instead and let Nick decide whether it deserves more.
6. Run the structural gate — before Nick reads it
python3 scripts/slopcheck.py \
--corpus '/Users/nicknisi/Developer/nicknisi.com/src/content/posts/*.md*' \
--draft path/to/draft.mdx
It calibrates against Nick's real posts and flags outliers in both directions — suppression is as suspicious as excess. A draft engineered to dodge a metric looks different from one that never considered it.
The gate's job is to produce Nick's rewrite list, not to certify the draft. Fix what it flags, then hand over.
The interiority section always prints and is not scored against the corpus — it exits non-zero while any claim is unconfirmed. A structurally clean draft with unconfirmed first-person claims is not a passing draft. Those lines go to Nick, not to you.
Vocabulary checks (the tighten-prose skill) run last and matter least. They
scan for 2024-era tells like "delve" and "leverage" and will pass a maximally
slop-shaped draft — they did exactly that on the post that caused this rewrite.
7. Hand off, don't ship
Deliver:
- The flat draft
- The interiority list — every sentence claiming his inner life, for him to rewrite or cut
- The gate output
- Open questions
Do not publish a post whose first-person sentences Nick has not read and approved. He isn't the editor of this artifact. He's the only source for half of it.
Output Format
See references/post-template.md for frontmatter schema and file conventions.
Bundled Resources
references/voice-tone.md— ceilings and prohibitions, with measured rates from his corpusreferences/post-template.md— frontmatter schema and structural skeletonreferences/frameworks.md— diagnostic vocabulary for critiquing a finished draftscripts/slopcheck.py— corpus-calibrated structural detector