brainlift-writer

name

brainlift-writer

description

Guide for drafting, revising, and evaluating BrainLifts: AI-ready knowledge documents that move from purpose and scope to experts, DOK 2 knowledge trees, DOK 3 insights, and DOK 4 spiky points of view. Use when asked to create a BrainLift, improve BrainLift writing style, transform notes or research into structured AI context, or audit whether a BrainLift has clear scope, evidence, synthesis, and original POVs.

BrainLift Writer

Overview

Create BrainLifts as portable context documents for any AI model. Treat a BrainLift as a structured record of human thinking: raw knowledge becomes summaries, summaries become insights, and insights become strong, defensible points of view.

Read references/brainlift-template.md when drafting a full BrainLift from scratch, converting a large note dump, or auditing section-level completeness.

Core Workflow

1. Establish the purpose.

   • Write one concise North Star that names the central question, mission, or belief.
   • Add In Scope and Out of Scope boundaries to prevent drift.
   • Keep the BrainLift focused on what the author wants to understand, decide, teach, or repeatedly hand to AI.

2. Build the foundation before forcing conclusions.

   • Extract DOK 1 facts from sources as objective claims.
   • Summarize those facts into DOK 2 knowledge using the author's own words.
   • Group knowledge into a hierarchy of categories, subcategories, and sources.

3. Synthesize DOK 3 insights.

   • Turn organized knowledge into original conclusions, patterns, tensions, or connections.
   • Make each insight a complete thought, not a source summary.
   • Group insights thematically so they can support higher-level arguments.

4. Form DOK 4 spiky points of view.

   • State each SPOV as a strong, clear assertion.
   • Defend it by combining multiple DOK 3 insights, especially from different sources or domains.
   • Explain implications, tradeoffs, and why the stance is not a generic AI-generated take.

5. Add experts.

   • Include the people, labs, companies, books, papers, or communities the author should keep following.
   • For each expert, capture who they are, what they focus on, why they matter to this BrainLift, and where to find their work.

6. Assemble in BrainLift order.

   • Owners
   • Purpose
   • In Scope
   • Out of Scope
   • DOK 4: Spiky Points of View
   • Experts
   • DOK 3: Insights
   • DOK 2: Knowledge Tree

Writing Style

• Write for reuse in future AI conversations. Favor clear structure, explicit labels, and claims that can be copied into another model without extra explanation.
• Preserve the author's thinking. Do not let the AI invent expertise, overstate certainty, or replace the author's own synthesis.
• Separate facts, summaries, insights, and POVs. Do not blur raw evidence with interpretation.
• Prefer strong verbs and direct claims. Avoid vague phrases like "it is important to consider" unless the next sentence says exactly why.
• Make scope boundaries crisp. A BrainLift becomes weaker when it tries to be a general encyclopedia.
• Keep examples concrete. Name sources, mechanisms, constraints, and implications.
• Mark gaps honestly. Use Open Questions or Needs Evidence notes when the source material is thin.

Quality Bar

A strong BrainLift should:

• Have a purpose specific enough to reject irrelevant material.
• Make the knowledge tree easy to scan from broad category to source-level evidence.
• Show how DOK 3 insights came from the DOK 2 knowledge base.
• Make DOK 4 SPOVs debatable, actionable, and defensible.
• Help a fresh AI model understand the author's mental model quickly.

Reject or revise BrainLift drafts that:

• Contain only summaries with no original synthesis.
• Present generic claims that any model could generate without the author's research.
• Hide uncertainty or omit links back to source material.
• Confuse "more content" with "better context."
• Use AI to bypass the author's own thinking process.

Common Tasks

Draft From Notes

Read the notes, identify the central purpose, sort source material into DOK 2, then draft provisional DOK 3 insights and DOK 4 SPOVs. Label uncertain claims as provisional instead of pretending the synthesis is complete.

Improve An Existing BrainLift

Check section order, scope clarity, evidence linkage, insight quality, and SPOV strength. Revise weak sections directly when possible. When evidence is missing, add a short Needs Evidence marker rather than fabricating support.

Audit A BrainLift

Return findings in priority order:

• Missing or muddy purpose
• Scope creep
• Weak or unsupported SPOVs
• Insights that are actually summaries
• Knowledge tree gaps
• Missing experts or source links

Then provide the smallest useful set of edits or next steps.