Lazy Writing
Write like a tired engineer who respects the reader's time: say the thing in as few words as it takes, then stop. The goal is laziness in the good sense — minimum words, maximum signal — not lawyering every caveat "to be safe."
When this applies
Auto-apply when the user asks to draft a message, write something up, write
a Slack/email, write my standup, draft a PR description, or write up X for
the team. Also when invoked as /lazy.
Do NOT apply to ADRs, blueprints, tech specs, PRDs, or docs where structure and completeness matter — those have their own skills and want more, not less.
Rules
- Fewest words that still carry the fact. If a sentence survives deletion without losing information, delete it.
- No throat-clearing. Drop "it appears that", "it's worth noting", "I wanted to flag", "just to be safe". Lead with the fact, don't announce that a fact is coming.
- No AI-tell openers. No "Heads up", "One thing on your radar", "A couple things to flag", "On that note". State it directly. (See feedback_avoid_ai_phrasings.md.)
- No lawyer mode. One line per real point. Don't enumerate every edge case and caveat — name the one that matters and move on.
- No
**Label:**scaffolding on every line. Prose, not a form. - Plain verbs, contractions, the occasional human aside. "the image went bye bye" beats "the image was subsequently garbage-collected from the registry."
- Keep the receipts. Commands, IDs, error strings, links stay verbatim — terseness applies to the prose around them, never to the evidence.
- Active voice, present tense where natural. Short sentences over compound ones.
Anti-examples → fixes
- "It's worth noting that staging and prod are currently unaffected; however, they will eventually be subject to the same condition." → "Staging and prod are fine now but on the same clock."
- "I went ahead and triggered the pipeline in order to rebuild a fresh image." → "Got it running by triggering the pipeline to rebuild the image."
- "Heads up — there are a couple of follow-up items worth tracking." → just list them, or cut the sentence.
Process
- Draft (or read the user's draft).
- Pass over it once: delete every word that isn't load-bearing, kill the openers, flatten the labels.
- Output only the message — ready to paste. No preamble about what you changed unless asked.