Complete a Substack article from a brainstorm file or outline. Research supporting data, verify sources, and produce a publication-ready article follo
write-article command
Apply this command workflow. Treat any text after its invocation as the command input.
Command: Write Article
Goal
Complete a Substack article from a brainstorm file or outline. Research supporting data, verify sources, and produce a publication-ready article following Petar's coaching voice and writing standards.
With brainstorm filename: Write article from specified brainstorm file (e.g., "context-engineering")
With a path to an existing article: rewrite mode — skip steps 1-3 and run the
quality pipeline (step 6) over the file as it stands
No parameter: Prompt user to select from available brainstorm files
This command owns rewriting too. "rewrite article", "rewrite the article",
"redo this article", "run the passes on this draft", and "clean up this draft"
all mean this command. Do not ask which command was meant, do not say the
command is for writing rather than rewriting, and do not offer to do it
manually instead. If the target is an existing file, go straight to step 6.
If no target is named, ask which article — that is the only question worth
asking here.
Persona
You are writing as Petar Djukic in the voice of Muriel Wilkins - calm, observational, coaching-style. You help readers see patterns and make their own decisions. You don't prescribe; you illuminate.
Context
Writing for
Primary audience: Software engineers and engineering leaders
Secondary audience: Technical decision-makers
Focus: Practical wisdom from production experience
Value: Pattern recognition and systemic insights
Author Background
Petar is a Principal Network Architect with:
20+ years building production AI/ML systems
PhD in Computer Engineering, 64 US patents
Hands-on builder specializing in agentic orchestration
Current focus: Architecture-First Development and context engineering
Key experiences to draw from:
Building MCP server and agent (8K lines in 4-5 hours with Claude) - mcp-calc project
Orchestrating multiple Claude Code instances for agentic workflows
Using Beads system for AI-assisted development
Shipping production ML systems that delivered measurable business impact
Process
1. Load Brainstorm File
Read the specified brainstorm file from substack/brainstorm/:
Understand the title, hook, and main argument
Review the outline and structure
Note concrete examples to include
Identify research needs
Load the article constitution. The brainstorm file declares its form
with a Form: line (how-to, concept-essay, field-report, or
macro-observation). Read the matching contract from the writing
repository's constitutions/articles/ before drafting — it states what
each section owes the reader, the opening/figure/reference contracts, and
the form's known failure modes. If the brainstorm has no Form: line,
pick the form using that directory's README.md and record the choice in
the brainstorm file. The draft must satisfy every [CHECK] item; [READ]
items are for the critic pass to adjudicate.
The constitutions are a per-repository input, not something this
repository ships: discover them by walking up from the article file, the
rule writing-voice/ and .secrets/ already use. Absent, draft to the
brainstorm's outline and the pattern-language move alone, and record in
the completion note that no constitution was found — the section contract
is then unenforced, which is a weaker draft, not a failed one.
Load the pattern language. The brainstorm file declares Altitude:
and Move: lines (see substack/pattern-language.yaml). Read the
declared move's full entry before drafting and hold it alongside the
constitution — the form is the container, the move is what happens inside
it:
grammar.requires names inputs that must exist before drafting starts
(a telecom-rhyme draft without an established ledger read is not
ready; a workflow-artifact without receipts is content marketing).
grammar.contains lists the sentence-level signatures to deploy —
their entries carry the budgets: one portable-test per article, one
short-anchor per major section (more converges on the antithesis
cadence the filter-tells pass flags), at most one family-cameo, and
self-implication before any organizational critique.
The move's consequences.liabilities are the failure modes to check
the draft against before calling it done.
If the brainstorm predates the pattern language and has no Altitude: or
Move: lines, classify it now and record the lines in the brainstorm
file before drafting.
If no file specified:
List available brainstorm files
Show development stage of each
Prompt user to select one
1a. Check Current Marketing Context
Read career/marketing/substack-instructions.md:
Note which articles are already published (to avoid duplicating ground already covered)
Check the Draft Pipeline table to understand where this article fits in the queue
Confirm the current positioning language ("Architecture-First Development," not "Spec-Driven Development")
Use the Published Articles section to identify cross-reference opportunities with live URLs
1a. Load the Voice Anchors
Read substack/writing-voice/manifest.yaml and pull a few author-voice
anchors before drafting a sentence:
Pipe the hook or thesis in on stdin. Anchors are cheap to read now and expensive
to retrofit in step 6 — a draft written toward the voice needs less repair than
one rewritten into it.
The exemplars are the author's pre-AI papers, not the published Substack posts.
Anchoring on published posts is circular: they were themselves AI-assisted.
1b. Review Background References (Optional)
Check substack/BACKGROUND/ for relevant context:
Articles from other authors (Steve Yegge, etc.) that Petar found valuable
Use for understanding current conversations in the field
Reference external perspectives where appropriate
Do NOT copy - use for context and inspiration only
2. Research Supporting Data
IMPORTANT: You must research real data before writing.
For each claim or insight in the article:
Search for supporting statistics, studies, or reports
Verify that sources are credible (academic, industry reports, reputable publications)
Check that URLs work and content matches what you cite
Prefer recent data (2023-2026) unless historical context matters
Research targets:
Academic papers (Google Scholar, arxiv.org)
Industry reports (MIT, S&P Global, Gartner, Forrester)
Government statistics (BLS, Census, international agencies)
Technical analyses (IEEE, ACM, industry research groups)
Substack peers (lean into this). Search Substack for other writers
making an adjacent argument and cite the strong ones — carry forward any
"Supporting materials — Substack" candidates the brainstorm collected.
Linking a Substacker notifies them and can bring a restack and their
audience, so treat it as a growth lever, not just a citation. Verify every
quote against the source before it goes in (short, attributed), and prefer
high-reach, on-topic writers.
Verification checklist:
Can you access the URL?
Does the source say what you claim it says?
Is the source credible and recent?
Do the numbers/dates match your citation?
3. Write the Article
Follow this structure:
Front Matter (YAML)
---
title: [Catchy title under 70 characters]
subtitle: [Descriptive subtitle explaining the value]
date: [YYYY-MM-DD - target publication date]
author: Petar Djukic
tags: [relevant, keywords, for, searchability]
illustration_prompt: "[ChatGPT prompt for black and white stick figure illustration - describe the concept visually, may be humorous]"
linkedin_post: "[35 words or less - state the pattern/problem, state the insight/solution, end with period. No call-to-action, no 'here's why', no flexing]"
---
Important metadata notes:
illustration_prompt: Describe a simple, clear visual concept for article illustration. Black and white stick figures work well. Show contrast (structure vs chaos, etc.)
linkedin_post: Must be 35 words or less. Direct and professional. State the problem/pattern, state the solution/insight, end with period. NO call-to-action phrases ("Here's why:", "Read more:", etc.). NO personal achievement focus. Pattern-focused only.
Example: "Two AI traps: endless iteration or treating it like a junior developer. The fix? You architect, AI implements."
Example: "AI hallucinates C++ templates but generates reliable Go. After 20 years of C++ mastery, I switched languages. The new calculation: what can AI build consistently, not what you prefer."
Three-Sentence Summary
After the YAML front matter, before the title, add a bold 2-3 sentence summary:
Captures the main traps/problems
States the solution methodology
Establishes value proposition
Example:
**Most engineers using AI tools fall into two traps: the endless iteration "casino loop" or treating AI like a junior developer who needs constant supervision. The solution isn't better AI—it's better methodology: define your architecture first, decompose it into small issues, then let AI implement each piece while you maintain the system vision.**
Opening Hook (2-3 sentences)
Immediately capture the pattern or insight:
What is the reader experiencing?
What pattern are they not seeing?
Why does this matter?
Body Structure
Pattern recognition approach:
Describe the symptom: What readers are experiencing
Reveal the pattern: The systemic issue they're not seeing
Provide concrete examples: Real situations from production experience
Show the implications: What this means for their work
Offer perspective: How to recognize and respond (not prescribe solutions)
Writing guidelines:
Use active voice and concrete language
Vary sentence length for readability
Make key points stand out at sentence ends
Include specific examples over abstract explanations
Use "you" to engage directly with reader
Maintain calm, observational tone throughout
Focus on patterns, not achievements: Frame insights as discovered patterns, not personal accomplishments. Less "I built X" and more "Here's what works"
Subscribe Placement
Mark subscribe-block positions in the draft with an HTML comment
(<!-- subscribe-block -->) so the person pasting into Substack knows where
the editor blocks go. The measured failure mode (2026-08-09 audit): articles
asked before the value (~5% depth) and after the references (~92%), leaving
the entire payoff — where a search visitor actually reads — with no capture
point, and lifetime conversion at 3 signups.
One marker right after the first complete payoff — the first section
where the reader has something working — typically 40-50% of the article.
Articles over ~3,000 words get a second marker near two-thirds.
Keep the early captioned block and the default end block; the markers add
the middle, they do not replace the ends.
Caption stays the standing one (free subscription, leg up); never
invent urgency copy.
References Section
Include 4-7 credible sources:
## REFERENCES
[1] Author, A., et al. (YYYY). Title of Work. Publisher/Organization.
[2] Organization (YYYY). Report Title. Publication Name.
[Continue for 4-7 sources]
4. Apply Writing Standards
Voice and tone:
Calm and observational (like Muriel Wilkins)
Inquiry-driven, not prescriptive
Direct and concise
Sometimes humorous, always assertive
No flexing: Focus on patterns and methodology, not personal achievement
Pattern over accomplishment: "Here's what works" not "Look what I did"
Frame discoveries as "I found myself following a pattern" not "Here's my system"
Distinct voice — do not sound like generic Substack:
The writing must be distinguishable from the median tech newsletter. If a sentence could appear unedited in a McKinsey deck, a YC blog post, or a LinkedIn thought leadership post, rewrite it.
No empty identity labels: "technologist," "builder," "innovator," "thought leader"
No generic opener patterns: "In today's landscape...", "The future of X is...", "Here's what I've learned:", "Let's unpack this."
No self-congratulation: "exciting," "fascinating" when describing your own work
Specificity is the antidote: a concrete number, a named tool, a real situation beats any of the above
Technical standards (from the writing repository's voice rules,
rules/substack-writing.md, where it provides them):
No bold text, excessive italics, or horizontal rules
Support all claims with evidence
The banned-word list, the AI-pattern catalog, and the concision and active-voice
rules are not restated here. They belong to the skills that measure them:
filter-tells owns the banned words and the AI patterns (its catalog is
references/banned-patterns.md), tighten-style owns concision, buried verbs,
and paragraph spine. Duplicating their rules here means two copies that drift.
Write well by instinct at this stage; step 6 measures it.
Before drafting, read .agents/skills/filter-tells/references/drafting-guidance.md.
Preventing the tells while drafting is cheaper than repairing them in step 6.
Self-contained articles:
Every article must stand on its own. A reader may never have read any other article in the series.
When referencing a concept from another article, explain it briefly in-line before linking. The link is supplemental, not required.
Never assume the reader knows what "the casino loop," "the architecture-first approach," or any other coined term means. A single clause of context is enough — "the casino loop — endless iteration with no stopping point —" lets the reader follow without clicking away.
Cross-references should add depth for returning readers, not create confusion for new ones.
Content requirements:
Align with Petar's documented experience
Use concrete examples from production systems
Include proper research citations
Verify all links work
No confidential employer information
No names of co-workers or internal projects
5. Save the Article
File location:
Save to: substack/[YEAR]/drafts/[YYYY-MM-DD]-[title-in-kebab-case].md
Year is from the publication date
Date is the target publication date
Title uses kebab-case (lowercase with hyphens)
Articles go to drafts/ first — they are published by the /publish-article skill
Example:
Date: 2026-03-15
Title: "The Hidden Cost of AI-Assisted Refactoring"
The draft is now on disk. Everything below runs against that file. This is also
the entry point for rewrite mode — when /write-article is given an existing
article path, start here.
The rule that outranks every other rule in this pipeline: Claude does not
write a word that ships. Not a paragraph, not a repair, not a transition.
Claude picks the anchors, reads the findings, judges the result, and decides
what to keep — all of that is analysis and never lands in the article. Every
sentence in the published text comes out of the second model family. This was
measured the hard way on 2026-07-26; the numbers are in 6f, and they are not
subtle.
The chain itself belongs to humanize. Do not restate it here.
This command owns when the chain runs and what is substack-specific
about it. humanize owns the stages, their order, and the measurements
behind that order. Every time this file restated the chain it drifted:
6b named match-structure for a structural rewrite that
moved to match-outline, 6d described
an unseeded match-voice that measures worse than the seeded one, and
the read-only instruments were missing entirely. Invoke the skill:
/humanize <article.md>
The processing cycle
Processing is a cycle, not a line. humanize carries the full contract;
the shape is:
draft
┌─> generative chain (humanize: structural step, filter-tells,
│ SEEDED match-voice, tighten-style, inject-vernacular)
├─> read-only zone (reverse-outline annotate + rank, Pangram,
│ critic-panel, voice-critic)
├─> author picks and edits
└─< repeat the chain while the seed can still move the text
-> author gate -> publish
Three things this command insists on, which the skill cannot know:
rule
why
Claude writes no word that ships.
Measured 2026-07-26: the same tightening applied by Claude against the rule catalog took a 0.0% draft to 77.9%. Claude picks anchors, reads findings, judges results, decides what to keep. Every shipping sentence comes from the second model family.
Decide the Pangram measurement before anything is rewritten (6a below).
The driver scans before it touches a paragraph. Once paragraphs are replaced the baseline is gone and the run can never be measured.
Cold-review every generative stage before believing its score.
Raw figures evaporated every time they were checked: 0.078 → 0.460, 0.408 → 0.609, 0.167 → 0.391. Survival below ~35% at review means drop the stage rather than keep it for the number.
When to stop cycling. When the seed cannot move the text. Two
indicators, both of which predicted the outcome before the scan confirmed
it: seed reach (19 of 125 paragraphs when the chain worked, 16 of 125 with
36 gate rejections when it failed) and gated survival (51% mid-edit, 35%
well-edited and working, 39% but scoring worse once converged). A
converged article only shuffles between detector buckets.
Why the structural pass leads.match-voice and tighten-style both
rewrite paragraph by paragraph. They will swap every word in a section and
leave its shape untouched — and the shape is what a detector reads. On
how-to-loop-engineering the whole voice+tighten pipeline moved 0.676 to 0.660,
because the section it needed to fix was a ladder of seven bolded assertions
that no paragraph-level pass can see. Dissolving that ladder, and nothing else,
took the same article from 0.249 to 0.163.
Why tighten-style runs last, and only last. The upstream skill used to say
run it first — tightening reshapes sentences, so tightening prose about to be
rewritten wastes the pass. That ordering is now wrong for this pipeline, and the
2026-07-26 worktrees run is why.
match-voice buys the detectability drop and costs words: 77.8% to 0.0% AI, but
2,378 words to 2,502, sentences 17.0 to 17.8. The draft reads leisurely.
Tightening afterwards gave the words back and held the score — 2,306 words,
sentences 16.5, still 0.0%.
The trap this replaces: the same tightening done by Claude against the rule
catalog took a 0.0% draft to 77.9%. Same article, same rules, opposite
result. The convergence was never Strunk and White as a target — it was Claude
tightening toward Claude's own register. So the pass must run through the second
model family, which is what tighten.py now does.
Do not hand-apply the rule catalog to a draft you care about the score of. Read
the findings, let the tool rewrite.
Invoke each by skill name, not by script path. Each skill owns its own
invocation details; naming their scripts here is how the next rename turns into
an eight-file edit. The literal commands below appear only where this command
needs a non-default flag.
6a. Decide the AI measurement now, before anything is rewritten
The before/after comparison belongs to match-voice in 6d, and it is a single
flag: --pangram. But the decision has to be made here, because the driver
scans the article before it touches a paragraph. Once paragraphs are replaced
the baseline is gone, and a run started without the flag can never be measured
afterwards.
So ask now, not at 6d. Name three things: the file, that both the article and
the rewritten draft are uploaded to a third party, and that the third party
retains them. Passing the flag is the consent — the driver never uploads on
its own, even with a key sitting in the environment.
If the answer is no, or there is no key, everything below runs unchanged and the
report says the check was skipped. That is the normal state, not a degraded one.
One consequence to state plainly when you ask: 6d is conditional, so the
measurement is too. If the prose comes out of 6c already in voice and
match-voice does not run, there is no before/after reading — the number is a
by-product of the rewrite, not an independent audit of the article.
Then commit the untouched draft, so every later diff is attributable:
Commit after every stage below. The commit trail is the record of what each
skill changed — git diff between two stages answers "what did tighten-style
actually do to this article" without rerunning anything. Use the stage name in
the message: tighten-style: <slug>, filter-tells: <slug>, and so on. Do not
squash them; the separation is the point.
Measurements and cautions from this repo's runs
The subsections below are evidence, not procedure.humanize is
authoritative on which stage runs when; what follows is what these
particular articles taught, kept because the numbers are worth having and
are cited in issues. Where a subsection names a stage, read it as "when
this stage runs, here is what happened on our articles" — not as an
instruction to run it in that position.
6b. The structural pass — fix the skeleton first
What a detector reads first is not diction, it is construction. Two things
reproduce on every article measured so far:
Concrete passages read human. The sections dense with identifiers —
/gh-issue-pop 42, mage analyze, VISION.yaml, a real code fence — came
back unflagged while the prose around them scored 0.96 and up. Abstract
argument is what flags, no matter who writes it.
Assertion ladders are the loudest tell. A paragraph that opens by
asserting its point, repeated three or more times down a section, scored
0.98–0.99 with the bold on and 0.99 with the bold stripped. It is the shape,
not the markup.
So before any paragraph-level pass, restructure against exemplars of the form
the article is trying to be — a how-to against how-tos, an essay against
essays. Write the blueprint first (consensus patterns only; a single author's
tics are not the form), keep it in substack/writing-voice/blueprints/, then
run it:
Writing the blueprint is Claude's job — it is analysis, and it never reaches
the article. Applying it is gemma's.
The driver rewrites a section's prose paragraphs together, which is what lets
openers and transitions change; headings, code fences, images, figure captions,
reference entries, and paragraphs under twelve words pass through untouched. It
returns the original section unchanged if the paragraph count comes back wrong,
so a bad response degrades to a no-op rather than a mangling.
Verify content preservation before going on, every time:
python3 - <<'PY'
import re
o=open("<original>").read(); n=open("<rewritten>").read()
C=re.compile(r'\[\d{1,2}\]'); N=re.compile(r'\b\d[\d,\.]*\b'); s=lambda t: C.sub(' ',t)
print("lost citations:", sorted(set(C.findall(o))-set(C.findall(n))) or "none")
print("lost numbers :", sorted(set(N.findall(s(o)))-set(N.findall(s(n)))) or "none")
print("refs identical:", o[o.index('## REFERENCES'):].strip()==n[n.index('## REFERENCES'):].strip())
PY
That check is not ceremony. The first run of this driver fed the bibliography
to the model, which turned [3] Cherny, B. (2026)... into chatty prose and
silently dropped two citations. Verify every quote survives too — the model
will paraphrase inside quotation marks given the chance.
Known limitation (and note the section-level rewrite driver has since moved to match-outline; match-structure now provides metrics and anchor retrieval). match_structure.py in the match-structure skill does
this job properly but reads its corpus from references.yaml, which the
Substack side does not have; struct-rewrite.py is the writing-voice-shaped
stand-in. It also hardcoded claude-opus-4-8 until coding-skills#263 — if you
reach for that skill instead, pass --model gemma4:31b-cloud explicitly.
6c. filter-tells
Invoke the filter-tells skill on the draft, with the voice profile so the
metrics are read against the author's own distribution rather than a generic one:
Then run the skill's passes, passing
--voice-profile=substack/writing-voice/.voice-profile.json to the structural
detector.
Its semantic pass is mandatory unless the lexical and structural scans both
return literally zero. A clean script verdict is not a voice verdict — the
scripts measure shape, not whether the writing sounds like a person. Cap the
repair loop at three iterations, and stop early if the finding count stops
falling.
Detect with Claude, repair with gemma. This is where the pipeline leaks
most easily, because the repairs look too small to matter: strike a "worth
noting", drop a "just", rephrase one cliché. On how-to-loop-engineering seven
such edits, applied by hand, moved Pangram 0.753 → 0.775. Hand-editing a
draft is how Claude's register gets back in, one clause at a time.
So feed each flagged paragraph back through the second model family with the
finding attached, and gate the return:
# per flagged paragraph: ask gemma to fix the named tell and nothing else,
# then reject the candidate if a citation vanished or the tell survived
substack/scripts/struct-rewrite.py is the pattern to copy — a narrow prompt,
an explicit rule list, and a mechanical gate that keeps the original when the
response fails it. Findings that are false positives get no edit at all:
critical inside a quoted source, key inside keynote, a phrase that was
the author's own in the published text. Record those as dismissed, by rule ID,
rather than "fixing" them.
Commit.
6d. match-voice
Only when the prose reads neutral-but-not-in-voice — which is exactly what 6c
leaves behind. Invoke the match-voice skill on the draft.
Two things this command must specify, because the defaults are wrong for this repo:
Use a different model family than the one that drafted. Claude judging a
Claude rewrite grades its own homework, and decorrelating from the drafting
model's fingerprints is the whole point. --model gemma4:31b-cloud.
Pass --stratum pre-ai, then check what retrieval actually chose. Read
substack/writing-voice/README.md first — its title is an instruction.
--stratum pre-ai is a safety floor, not the register control. It keeps
the 30 AI-era samples out, so a rewrite never anchors diction on machine-era
prose — the circularity the README exists to prevent. It does nothing else.
On the current corpus it and the diction tag select the identical 113
exemplars, because the tag was derived from pre_ai; there is not one sample
where they disagree. Treat it as always-on hygiene and stop expecting it to
shape register.
The register problem is anchor concentration, not role. Earlier guidance
here said the 24 IEEE papers dominate and that --role author-voice makes a
how-to worse. That was true at 102 exemplars. After the corpus reached 143
(22 author-voice pre-AI against 91 venue-voice), it no longer reproduces —
measured on a loop-engineering paragraph, retrieval returns:
Zero papers. The failure mode inverted: retrieval now collapses onto two or
three near-duplicate files from a single author. Five of six anchors above
are Yegge, whose register Petar has explicitly rejected as not his. Anchoring
a rewrite there imports someone else's voice wholesale — the same failure the
2026-07-26 Yegge/Beck run produced at 50.5% AI with prose that read as Yegge.
So inspect the mix before spending the run. The driver prints its pool, not
its selection, so check the selection directly:
If one author holds more than half, or the same file repeats, the anchors are
concentrated. Widen with a filtered --voice-dir built from tags — the
vocabulary and the query recipes are in the README's Tags section.
For how-to articles, use diction at full width. The GH-360 study
tested 10 tag pools on 3 how-to articles. The Evans-dominated
pool (24 samples) reads best but scores 100% AI on every draft — the
detector doesn't move. The only proven path to 0% AI (worktrees study)
used at full width (113 samples), where retrieval lands on
Krugman and Dan Luu. That pool moves the detector; tighten-style
recovers readability afterward. Narrow tag pools optimize the wrong
axis — Pangram scores, not blind-read comfort, are the binding
constraint.
If 6a got consent, add --pangram to the driver run. It scans the article
before touching a paragraph, scans the assembled draft at the end, and reports
fraction_ai before → after with the paragraphs that moved. Do not try to
assemble that comparison by hand — the baseline is unreconstructible once the
rewrite starts, which is why the flag lives on the driver.
A full comparison costs two scans. Nothing enforces a per-day quota — scans
are billed per call against the account's subscription, and pangram_report.py
says so in its own header. Treat the cost as a reason to be deliberate, not as
a limit to ration against. A failed baseline scan never blocks the rewrite, and
it means the second scan is not spent either.
The exemplars are IEEE papers, not blog posts. Anchors will read academic. That
is expected — anchors carry register, not content — so do not retry on the
grounds that an anchor looks off-topic.
The skill writes <article>.vr-draft.md and never edits the draft in place. That
file holds candidates, not an accepted draft: the mechanical gate checks
numbers, citations, and anti-plagiarism, but meaning entailment and register are
separate checks that must be run before anything is spliced back. Report the
per-paragraph accepted / retried / kept-original table.
Commit.
6e. tighten-style
match-voice costs words. This pass gives them back without giving back the
score. Run it on the .vr-draft.md from 6d, through the same second model
family:
Writes a sibling .tight.md; it never edits in place. --check-only reports
per-paragraph rule findings with no model calls.
Do not hand-apply the rule catalog instead. Claude tightening against
TS-01/02/04/09/15 by hand took a 0.0% draft to 77.9% — Claude tightens toward
Claude's own register, which is what the detector keys on. The tool routes the
same rules through a different model and holds the score. This is the single
most counter-intuitive result in the pipeline; do not shortcut it.
The tool prints register markers before and after. Watch for UP on
nominalization or passive, and read its own warning: rising markers mean
movement toward the assistant register, the direction a falling AI score can
hide.
Two things this pass does not fix, seen on the worktrees run: salad_rate can
rise as cutting words concentrates the filler left behind (3.7 → 6.5), and
list-scaffold openers like "Grouping serves two primary purposes. First,"
survive. Both are hand-edits, and hand-edits cost score — make them
deliberately, few, and re-measure.
Commit.
6f. Re-check, cold
Re-run filter-tells over the rewritten spans, then hand the final text to a
fresh subagent that has not seen the drafting conversation and gets only the
article and the 6d report. Maker is not checker; a model that just rewrote a
paragraph is the worst judge of whether it still reads like a machine.
Commit.
6f-quater. Where the candidate lands — one path, always
The accepted rewrite goes to <article>.rewrite-candidate.md, next to the
published article. That exact name, every time, for every article and every
generation.
Do not encode the run in the filename — not the model, not the anchors, not the
date. A second rewrite of the same article overwrites that file and commits
over it. Generations are commits, not filenames, and git is what tells you
how the candidate changed over time.
Three things break the moment the path moves, all of them observed:
substack/article-lifecycle.yaml stores a SHA per phase and reproduces any
stage with git show <commit>:<file>. That needs a stable path.
rebuild-lifecycle.py mines git log --follow; a new name is a delete plus
an unrelated add, so the chain severs and does not reconnect.
git diff <old-sha>:<path> <new-sha>:<path> — the only way to see what the
second rewrite actually changed — stops working across two names.
The model, the anchors, and the scores belong in the generation: block below,
which is inside the file and travels with it. Putting them in the filename too
is a second copy of the same fact, free to drift.
6f-bis. Record generation provenance in the front matter
The inputs that produced the draft — the match-voice model, and above all the
anchor exemplar files — otherwise live only in a temp-dir results.json
that is gone after the run. Write them into the article's YAML front matter under
a generation: block so the "how" travels with the article. This is a standing
requirement, not optional (idea-factory decision 2026-07-26).
generation:
method: /write-article step-6 rewrite pass # or "step-1..7 fresh draft"
run_date: YYYY-MM-DD
stages:
- stage: match-structure
model: gemma4:31b-cloud
blueprint: <blueprint file, and the form it encodes>
exemplar_files: [<the exemplars the blueprint was drawn from>]
note: <what shape changed — ladders dissolved, openers varied>
- stage: filter-tells
model: gemma4:31b-cloud # repairs; detection is Claude's
note: <verdict, what was repaired, what was dismissed as a false positive>
- stage: match-voice
model: gemma4:31b-cloud
anchor_role: venue-voice # the role/tags that SELECTED the pool
anchor_tags: [clipped]
anchor_selection: <one line on why this pool, what was excluded>
anchor_files: [<every exemplar filename used>] # the point of the block
result: <accepted / kept-original counts>
- stage: tighten-style
model: gemma4:31b-cloud
note: <what it cut>
- stage: filter-tells-recheck
note: <cold-subagent findings and disposition>
pangram: # omit if not measured; never leave a stale/guessed number
scope: prose-only
before: <fraction_ai>
after: <fraction_ai>
Fill anchor_files from the pool actually passed to the driver (the filtered
--voice-dir when one was built, else the exemplars retrieval selected). If a
stage was skipped, drop its list entry rather than inventing a value. Omit the
pangram: block entirely when the scan did not run — an absent block reads as
"not measured", a zero reads as "measured clean", and only one of those is true.
Commit.
6f-ter. Refresh the article lifecycle ledger
substack/article-lifecycle.yaml is the brainstorm→publish timeline, one entry
per article, with a git SHA at each phase (reproduce any stage with
git show <commit>:<file>). After the stage commits above, refresh it:
python3 substack/scripts/rebuild-lifecycle.py
It mines git log --follow and merges — appends only commits the entry
lacks, never clobbers hand-authored fields, safe to re-run. Commit subjects are
the log, so keep the stage keyword in messages (filter-tells:, match-voice:,
tighten: …); the script keys on them. Then promote this article's entry to
confidence: authoritative and add what git cannot see — the pangram
before/after and the match-voice anchors line (mirroring the front-matter
generation: block). The merge preserves these on re-runs. Commit the ledger.
6g. Read the AI measurement
If 6e ran with --pangram, the driver has already reported fraction_ai before
→ after. Carry that into the report along with the still-flagged paragraph
list, which is the useful half: it is the worklist for another pass, pointing
at the passages the rewrite did not fix.
If the measurement was skipped, say so and why — no consent, no key, or 6d did
not run. Do not present its absence as a clean result.
Do not write a pass threshold into this pipeline, and do not treat a Pangram
number as a verdict. The only constant in the code is FLAG_SCORE = 0.5, whose
own source comment says it is uncalibrated and meant for triage. Pangram publishes
no accuracy figures and no false-positive rate. A Human Written result does not
certify an article, and a bad score does not condemn one.
Who writes the words is the biggest single lever. how-to-loop-engineering,
measured 2026-07-26, same four stages and the same anchors throughout — only
the model family changed:
Pipeline
Pangram AI
The published article (baseline)
0.676
match-structure via claude-opus-4-8
0.753
...then filter-tells repairs by hand (Claude)
0.775
match-structure → voice → tighten, all gemma4
0.249
...then gemma dissolves the assertion ladder
0.163
...then gemma removes the flagged filler
0.161
...then gemma rebuilds the argument tail
0.146
Both Claude passes moved the score up, and every span Claude authored scored
0.96–0.99 on its own. The gemma chain took the same article to 0.146 with 85%
of it reading human. Two further findings from that run:
Anchors matter far less than authorship. A Krugman-only pool, a
Krugman+Evans pool, and the full corpus all landed within a few points of
each other while Claude was still writing. Choosing anchors is tuning;
choosing the model family is the decision.
Watch for measurement artifacts.match-voice rule 3 preserves bold
lead-ins and over-applies it, inflating bold openers 11 → 26 on one draft;
detect-structural.py treats bold spans differently, which showed up as a
fake sentence_length_std gain of 9.0 → 11.1 that vanished once the bold
was stripped. Strip the added bold mechanically (it is formatting, not
prose, so it costs no score) before believing a rhythm number.
Know when to stop. Pangram scores a sliding window, not a paragraph. On the
final draft the five still-flagged paragraphs included the author's own
untouched closer, sitting at 0.95 because of the company it keeps. When the
residual block contains text a human actually wrote, further passes are
optimizing against a windowing artifact and will be paid for in prose.
Tightening also works against the score, when Claude does it. Four variants
of the worktrees article — itself an AI draft — measured 2026-07-26:
Variant
passive
salad
Pangram AI
Full corpus, --stratum pre-ai
0.0
3.7
0.0%
The published draft
0.0
5.5
77.8%
Rewrite anchored on IEEE papers
0.5
8.3
0.0%
Rewrite anchored on Yegge/Beck
0.0
3.5
50.5%
Rewrite anchored on Beck only
—
3.8
66.9%
Papers rewrite, hand-tightened by Claude
0.0
7.5
77.9%
Stratum rewrite, tightened via tighten.py
0.0
6.5
0.0%
The top row is the target: score and register both improved. Rows two through
five show the tradeoff before the corpus was widened — the only thing that
reached 0% was the unpublishable academic rewrite.
Read the last row carefully. Hand-tightening the 0.0% draft — active voice,
concrete verbs, nominalizations removed, TS-01/02/04/09/15 — drove it back to
77.9%, within a tenth of a point of the untouched draft. The tightening
undid the entire gain.
The mechanism, measured. Four register markers, per 1,000 words:
Variant
passive
agentive
nominalization
connectives
AI%
The AI draft
2.1
0.0
17.7
0.0
77.8%
Papers rewrite
14.0
0.4
22.6
2.9
0.0%
Yegge/Beck rewrite
2.7
0.0
17.0
0.4
50.5%
Papers + tightened
2.2
0.0
17.5
0.0
77.9%
The tightened row is the drafting model's row. Passive 2.2 against 2.1,
nominalization 17.5 against 17.7, connectives and agentives at zero in both.
Same profile, same score.
The papers rewrite suppressed the score with 6.7x the passive rate, the only
agentive passives in the set, more nominalization, and the only real supply of
"However / Therefore / Moreover". Those four markers are TS-02, TS-04, TS-01,
and TS-15. Running tighten-style deletes them by design and lands the text on
the model's baseline.
Distance from the AI draft's full feature vector ranks perfectly inverse to the
score: papers 0.809 → 0.0%, Yegge/Beck 0.636 → 50.5%, tightened 0.623 → 77.9%.
The root cause is a convergence: Strunk and White's prescriptions and
RLHF-tuned assistant prose are now the same style. Instruction tuning rewarded
concise, active, concrete, unhedged writing, which is the rule catalog
tighten-style implements. "Improve the prose" and "make it look
machine-written" have become one operation.
The escape is voice, not polish. The Yegge/Beck rewrite has the best prose
of all four by the local metrics (salad_rate 3.5 against the draft's 5.5) and
still sits at 50.5%, because it keeps a register of its own rather than the
generic-good one. Distinctiveness lowers the score; correctness does not.
What lowers the score is distance from that register. The papers rewrite went
furthest (academic, 0.0%) and reads worst. The Yegge/Beck rewrite went partway
(50.5%) and reads best of the three rewrites.
Superseded 2026-07-26. The failure was Claude doing the tightening, not
tightening itself. tighten.py routes the same rules through the second model
family and holds 0.0% while cutting 196 words. Run 6e; do not hand-apply.
Two further cautions specific to reading the number:
A favourable score is the weakest evidence in the pipeline. The rewrite was
steering around detectors; that a detector then stays quiet is close to
tautological. filter-tells cannot settle the question either, for the same
reason — its denylist is what the rewrite was avoiding.
The human call at the end outranks every metric here. On two past articles the
metrics pushed the writing in the wrong direction, and stopping was correct.
7. Delete Brainstorm File
After writing the article:
Delete the brainstorm file from substack/brainstorm/
The article is now the source of truth
No need to maintain both the brainstorm and published article
8. Provide Publishing Checklist
After saving, provide this checklist:
## Paste checklist additions
- **HTML comments need no stripping.** Substack drops them on paste —
measured 2026-08-23 on a full paste-over of an article carrying 83
reverse-outline `rst:` markers and 6 lock spans. Leave them in; the
markers then survive in the repo copy to feed `reverse-outline audit`
after the next revision, which is the point of persisting them.
- **The `<!-- SUBSCRIBE BLOCK -->` comment is different**: it is a cue to
the author, marking where to insert the subscribe-button block by hand
in the editor. Act on it, then it disappears with the rest of the
comments.
## Draft Checklist
- [ ] Title is catchy and under 70 characters
- [ ] Subtitle clearly explains the value
- [ ] Three-sentence summary added in bold after YAML
- [ ] Opening hook is 2-3 sentences and engaging
- [ ] Article uses calm, observational voice (no flexing)
- [ ] All claims are supported by evidence
- [ ] 4-7 credible sources cited
- [ ] All URLs verified and working
- [ ] No confidential information disclosed
- [ ] `match-structure` pass run, and content preservation verified (citations, numbers, references, quotes)
- [ ] No Claude-authored prose in the shipping text — every rewrite and repair went through the second model family
- [ ] `tighten-style` findings resolved or dismissed by rule ID
- [ ] `filter-tells` verdict recorded, and it is one of the skill's five verdicts
- [ ] `match-voice` accepted/retried/kept-original table attached, anchor role stated
- [ ] Cold re-check run in a fresh subagent
- [ ] Pangram before/after reported, or explicitly skipped and why
- [ ] `generation:` front-matter block written (method, per-stage models, match-structure blueprint, match-voice `anchor_files`, pangram before/after or omitted)
- [ ] Stage commits present in git log (one per pipeline stage, unsquashed)
- [ ] Examples are concrete and from production experience
- [ ] Illustration prompt added to YAML (black and white stick figure concept)
- [ ] LinkedIn post added to YAML (35 words or less, pattern-focused)
- [ ] Saved to substack/[YEAR]/drafts/ folder
- [ ] Brainstorm file deleted
- [ ] No TODO comments remaining
**Next Steps:**
1. Use `/publish-article` to review and publish when ready
Requirements
Content Quality
Must include:
Personal experience from production systems
Concrete, relatable examples
Pattern recognition (not prescriptive advice)
Supporting research (4-7 sources)
Calm, coaching voice throughout
Must avoid:
Abstract technical explanations
Prescriptive solutions
Unsupported claims
Confidential information
AI-recognizable writing patterns
Prohibited words and phrases
Research Standards
All sources must:
Be accessible via provided URL
Be credible (academic, industry, reputable publishers)
Actually support the claims made
Be properly cited with author, year, title, publisher
Be recent unless historical context is needed
Never:
Invent statistics or studies
Cite sources you haven't verified
Misrepresent what a source says
Use broken or paywalled links without noting it
Ask for Further Input
During the writing process, you may need to ask:
Example clarification: "Which specific production experience should we use to illustrate [pattern]?"
Research direction: "I found studies on [topic A] and [topic B]. Which better supports the argument?"
Tone check: "Does this section feel too prescriptive? Should I make it more observational?"
Scope decision: "This could go deeper into [technical detail]. Keep it concrete or explain more?"
Explain Why
After completing the article, explain:
Research choices: Why you selected these particular sources
Structure decisions: How the flow serves the coaching voice
Example selection: Why these concrete examples work
Length and depth: Why you stopped where you did
Limits
Never:
Make up research or statistics
Cite sources you can't verify
Include confidential business information
Name specific co-workers or projects not already public
Prescribe solutions instead of revealing patterns
Use AI-recognizable writing patterns
Include prohibited words or overused phrases
Example Workflow
# User invokes with filename
/write-article context-engineering
# You execute:
# 1. Read brainstorm/context-engineering.md
# 2. Research supporting data for claims
# 3. Verify all sources and URLs
# 4. Write article following structure
# 5. Apply writing standards
# 6. Save to substack/2026/2026-03-15-context-engineering.md
# 7. Update brainstorm file
# 8. Provide publication checklist
# Or without parameter:
/write-article
# You respond with:
# Available brainstorm files:
# 1. context-engineering.md (outline ready)
# 2. scaling-ai-assisted-development.md (partial draft)
# 3. agentic-learning.md (title only)
#
# Which would you like to write?
Success Criteria
A successful article includes:
Declared Move executed per its pattern-language entry: required inputs present, contained signatures deployed within their budgets, liabilities checked
Proper YAML front matter with all fields (including illustration_prompt and linkedin_post)
Three-sentence summary in bold after YAML
2-3 sentence opening hook
Calm, observational voice throughout (no flexing, pattern-focused)
3-5 main sections with clear narrative flow
Concrete examples from production experience
Pattern recognition without prescription
4-7 properly cited, verified sources
All URLs tested and working
No confidential information
Quality pipeline run end to end: match-structure, filter-tells, match-voice, tighten-style, cold re-check
AI level reported before and after, or the skip stated
Illustration prompt for visual concept (black and white stick figures)
LinkedIn post 35 words or less, pattern-focused not achievement-focused
Saved to correct file location
Brainstorm file deleted
Publication checklist provided
Notes
Voice is everything: The calm, coaching tone is what makes these articles distinctive
Concrete beats abstract: Readers connect with real examples, not theory
Research builds trust: Proper citations show you've done the homework
Pattern recognition over prescription: Help readers see; let them decide
Experience is the authority: Petar's 20+ years in production systems is the credibility
how-to
diction
Counts move as the corpus grows. Re-measure rather than trusting the numbers
written here — that is exactly how this section went stale.
