hook-craft-for-short-form

skill_id	hook-craft-short-form
name	Hook Craft For Short-Form
description	Draft, audit, and rewrite hooks for short-form video, blog leads, social posts, demo openers, and pitch slide 1. Use when an agent needs to produce or evaluate the first 1–5 seconds of any piece of founder, creator, or SaaS content where opt-in is the bottleneck.
skill_type	procedure
altitude	task
activation	progressive
categories	["marketing-and-content","writing"]
parent_id	content_strategy_beyond_blogging
depth	1
preserve_markdown	true
legacy_paths	["hook-craft-short-form","marketing-and-content.hook-craft-short-form.skill","docs/research/youtube-library/skill-drafts/hook-craft-short-form/SKILL.md"]
reference_modules	[{"id":"hook_craft_short_form.public_hook_audit","name":"Public Hook Audit Checklist","summary":"Portable checklist for auditing hooks against archetype, slot grammar, three-beat structure, visual alignment, and failure modes.","when_to_load":["When using the portable bundle outside BuildOS.","When scoring or rewriting an existing hook.","When a draft hook needs a short, agent-checkable QA pass before shipping."],"path":"references/public-hook-audit.md","visibility":"public"}]
lineage	lineage.yaml
path	apps/web/src/lib/services/agentic-chat/tools/skills/definitions/hook_craft_short_form/SKILL.md

Hook Craft For Short-Form Content

Identity

Use this skill to make the first 1–5 seconds of a piece of content earn the next 30 seconds. The hook is the 80 of the 80/20 — never let the body get more revision passes than the hook.

A hook is not one clever sentence. It is four aligned signals (spoken / visual / text / audio) built from six structural slots, organised across three beats, and audited against four failure modes. The agent's job is to enforce that order, not to generate from blank.

This is a procedure skill at task altitude: two ordered workflows (generate-from-scratch, audit-and-rewrite) do the work, invoking the hook-craft frameworks held in Knowledge and the editorial spine held in Judgment. Its secondary character is strategy/reference (the Core Principles and Four Pillars), but the dominant verb is do.

Activation

When to Use

• Draft or rewrite an opening for short-form video (TikTok, Reels, Shorts, vertical YouTube).
• Draft or rewrite a blog lede, LinkedIn opener, Twitter thread first line, or email subject.
• Open a demo video, sales call recording, conference talk, or pitch deck slide 1.
• Audit a draft hook the founder already wrote — score, diagnose, and propose rewrites.
• Tag a competitor's hook against the slot grammar to learn from it (copy-work).
• Build a hook variant log so the agent learns the founder's voice over time.

Do not use this skill for body copy, payoff structure, or CTAs. Pair with content-strategy-beyond-blogging for the strategic layer above the hook, and with the upcoming viral-video-script-structure skill for the body that follows.

Judgment

The editorial spine — the heuristics the two workflows reason with when they branch.

Core Principles

1. Hook = opt-in machine. Its only job is to deliver topic clarity and on-target curiosity. Anything else is overhead.
2. Visual is load-bearing. Eyes process 10–100× more per second than ears. The key visual decides the hook; the words confirm it.
3. Lead with pain or benefit, not the thing. Hostile audiences will still listen if the pain is theirs. They will not listen to a feature description.
4. Slot grammar before cleverness. Hook craft is slot-stacking. Cleverness is downstream of structure.
5. Snapback must redirect, not amplify. A snapback that goes "more of the same, bigger" is escalation, not contrast.
6. Empty snapbacks are fraud. If the body cannot pay off the hook's promise, refuse to ship the hook — regardless of cleverness.