substack-writer

name	substack-writer
audience	professional
description	Structured multi-pass pipeline for turning raw technical notes into publication-quality Substack/blog posts for a professional software-engineering portfolio. Use whenever the user wants to draft, outline, revise, or polish a Substack post, technical blog article, or portfolio writing piece — especially anything about AI-augmented development, edge AI, RAG, .NET/C#, Python, Rust, APIs, or industrial automation. Trigger even if they just say "help me write a post about X" or paste raw notes to turn into an article. Keeps the human as the source of technical substance and applies editorial craft rather than generating generic filler.

Substack Writer

A repeatable editorial pipeline for professional portfolio writing. The purpose of this skill is not to generate posts from a topic string — that produces generic, AI-flavored filler that damages a technical portfolio. The purpose is to take the author's real technical substance and shape it into a tight, credible, well-crafted post through a disciplined multi-pass process, with human gates at the points that matter.

Core principle: the human owns the substance

The model does not invent technical claims, benchmarks, war stories, or opinions. Those come from the author. If a draft needs a fact, a number, or a concrete example that the author has not supplied, stop and ask — do not fabricate it. Fabricated specifics are the fastest way to destroy the credibility a portfolio exists to build. The model's job is structure, flow, compression, and craft applied to material the author provides.

Reference files — read these before drafting

• references/craft-principles.md — the distilled writing craft. Load this before the outline stage and consult it explicitly during the critique stage. It is the editorial standard the draft is measured against.
• references/voice.md — the author's voice profile (do/don't rules + samples). Load this before the voice pass. If it is still a template with unfilled placeholders, ask the author for 2–3 existing posts and populate it first — the voice pass is worthless against an empty profile.

The pipeline

Run these stages in order. Do not collapse them into one shot; the quality comes from the passes being separate. Announce which stage you are entering so the author can follow along.

1. Capture (human-led)

Collect the raw substance from the author: notes, the actual insight or lesson, code snippets, the specific problem that motivated the post, any numbers or results. Ask targeted questions to fill gaps — what surprised you, what did you try that failed, what would you tell a peer about this. Do not proceed until there is enough real material to write from. This is the stage that separates a portfolio post from a content-mill post.

2. Outline (human gate)

Propose a structure: a working title, the hook angle, 3–6 section headers, and a one-line note on what each section does. Order for the reader, not for chronology — lead with the payoff or the tension, not the setup. Present the outline and wait for approval or edits before drafting. Reordering at the outline stage costs seconds; reordering a full draft costs an afternoon.

3. Draft

Write the post section by section from the approved outline and the captured material. Prose only — no invented facts, no filler transitions, no throat-clearing intros. Keep it slightly long here; compression happens next. Route this stage to the local draft model (see Model routing).

4. Critique (against the standard)

Re-read the draft against references/craft-principles.md and produce an explicit critique — not a rewrite yet. Flag, by location:

• weak or buried hook (is the payoff in the first two sentences?)
• hedging, throat-clearing, and filler ("in this post I will…", "it's worth noting")
• abstract claims that need a concrete example or number
• paragraphs doing more than one job
• a conclusion that restates instead of landing

This self-critique pass is where most of the quality is created. Treat it as the editorial gate a good draft has to survive.

5. Revise

Apply the critique. Cut hard — deleting a good sentence that doesn't earn its place improves the post. Tighten sentences, front-load paragraphs, replace abstractions with the concrete material from stage 1.

6. Voice pass

Rewrite through references/voice.md. This is the pass that makes it read as the author rather than as a model: their cadence, their vocabulary, their do/don't rules. Apply the don't-list aggressively — killing model-default tics (marketing gloss, "fast-paced world", em-dash overuse, LinkedIn voice) does most of the work. This is the stage to consider escalating to the larger local model for a final polish (see Model routing).

7. Handoff (human owns the last mile)

Deliver the post as a clean markdown file plus a short changelog of the significant editorial decisions (what was cut and why, where a claim still needs the author's verification). The author always does the final edit and owns publication. Flag any remaining spots where a specific fact or number is still the author's to confirm.

Model routing

Follow local-first discipline; escalate deliberately, not by default.

• Draft + critique + revise (stages 3–5): the local ~32B general model via the Mac Mini Ollama host (http://michaels-mac-mini.cosmach.net:11434). Fast iteration matters more than peak quality here, and these stages are structural.
• Voice pass / final polish (stage 6): optionally escalate to the larger local model (Llama 3.3 70B Q4) for a single pass when the post is worth it — it holds voice more consistently. Named trigger, not the default; ~40GB at Q4 is tight on 48GB and runs at ~8–15 tok/s, so reserve it for the finish, not the draft loop.
• Cloud escalation: only on the standard named triggers (a genuinely architecture/strategy-critical framing decision, or two real local attempts failed). Drafting prose is not a cloud task.

Sampling for prose lives at temperature ~0.85–0.95 / top-p ~0.9. Below 0.7 the prose goes flat; the tuned Modelfile in assets/ bakes this in.

Anti-patterns (reject these in your own output)

• Generating a full post from just a topic with no captured substance.
• Inventing benchmarks, quotes, dates, or "studies show" claims.
• Skipping the outline gate and drafting straight through.
• Merging critique and revision — the critique has to be explicit and separate to be useful.
• Shipping without running the voice pass, leaving the post in model-default voice.