What I took back off the shelf

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have a bad habit of writing a little skill file for something, using it twice, then completely forgetting which repo I left it in. Markdown scattered across nine projects like odd socks. So a couple of weekends back I finally did the tidy-up: gather the lot, push them into the public marketplace, delete the local copies, one source of truth, like a grown-up.

Very satisfying! Right up until the blog skills came up on the deletion list and I stopped dead.

The deletion list

Nothing was wrong with the plan, mind. The plan was precisely what I’d asked for, being carried out to the letter, which in my experience is usually the moment you find out the instruction was the problem.

The word doing the damage was “reusable”. I’d never actually tested it against the blog skills, I’d just waved it through, because they were skills, and they were mine, and I was certainly reusing them… by me, in one repo, on one blog, to a set of habits nobody else on this earth has or particularly wants. That isn’t reusable. That’s just filed somewhere tidy.

And then I looked properly, and found the second thing, which was the one that actually mattered.

Three things I took back

The voice profile. Nine hundred-odd lines describing how I write. Punctuation habits, sentence shapes, how I open a piece, the words I’d never use (there’s a list, it is long, and every word on it has turned up in somebody’s LinkedIn post this week). It exists because early drafts kept coming back sounding like a press release from a company that sells synergy, and the only fix I could think of was to sit down and write out what “sounding like me” actually consists of.

Publishing that is handing over the key to my own byline. Would anyone bother? Almost certainly not. Not really the point though, is it. It’s the same instinct that stops you posting a photo of your signature, and I notice nobody ever asks you to justify that one.

The grounding references. Two more files, one for the career and one for everything else. Burnout, the years it took to climb back out of it, family, the bits that make a personal essay land instead of reading like an anecdote at a party. They’re there so that a draft about any of it comes out accurate rather than invented. They are also, straightforwardly… private. And a fair chunk of what’s in them isn’t only mine to hand over.

The shape of the assistance itself. How much of the pipeline is agent-run, which parts, where the handover sits.

Now that third one is the uncomfortable one, and I’d rather say so myself than have you spot it for me. I write about using AI constantly. It’s most of what this blog has been for a year. So there’s a perfectly fair question sitting there with its hand up: if you’re that open about the practice, what exactly are you being cagey about?

Why those three are really one thing

Took me a good while to get to the answer… and it’s this. They aren’t three separate private things that happen to sit near each other on a shelf. They’re one object, photographed from three sides.

The voice profile is how I sound. The grounding references are what I’ve lived. The pipeline is the machine that runs the first across the second and posts the result. Ship all three together and you haven’t published a working practice at all, you’ve published a working replica.

Somebody could just… run it.

Writing about using an agent is a description. Shipping the voice, the life, and the assembly instructions is a kit, batteries included. I’m relaxed about the first and I’m not doing the second, and the moment I put it that way the discomfort packed up and left, because it turned out I’d never been holding two positions in the first place.

What I didn’t do, and I want to be clear here because it would have been much the easier move, is pull the lot and call it private.

That isn’t principle. That’s hoarding with better PR.

One of those skills was genuinely useful to other people, or half of it was. It watches for the moment where the work you’re doing turns into something worth writing about, and nudges you to capture it before it evaporates. Everybody with a blog and an agent has that problem. What made mine unshareable wasn’t the idea at all, it was that every example in it was one of my own posts and every filing instruction pointed straight at my backlog.

So I split it down the middle: shipped the pattern, kept the instance. The generic half went out as spot-writing-material, which knows that you ought to notice this stuff, helps you wire up wherever you keep it, and holds no opinion whatsoever on what your topics should look like. Share the shape, keep the filling.

Then, having got my eye in, I went looking for more to give away rather than less, which is the bit I’d point at if anyone accused me of being precious about it. Two extra triggers went into the shared version that had only ever lived in my head: notice it when you’ve designed a novel approach to a new problem, and notice it when the person you’re working with says something that shows real judgement. Both straight out of my own practice. Neither one says a thing about me.

Where the line actually sits

Open-sourcing your process is fashionable and mostly costless, and I say that as a man who has done it and rather enjoyed himself. Process documents are generic almost by definition. Publishing them costs you nothing, because there was never anything of yours in there to begin with. I’d argued the same shape myself a few weeks earlier, consolidating three agents’ instruction files into one shared core in House rules. This is where that argument stops.

What tests the principle is the artefact that is specifically you, and I don’t think the answer is that you should always ship it. Some of it shouldn’t go. Not because it’s a competitive advantage, which is the reason people reach for first because it sounds commercial and hard-nosed, but because it’s identity. Different category entirely, and a far easier call to make once you’ve named it right.

Since we’re on the subject

Somebody is going to ask how much of this particular post I typed myself.

I’m not telling. Some are more hands-on than others and I’ve grown rather fond of you not knowing which is which. What I will say is that this one went round twice before I let it out, the second time because it read like a competent stranger doing an impression of me, and that every word has been past my eyes with a pen in my hand.

Two of me on this blog these days. Only one of us gets the blame for a sentence.

The marketplace is still there, and it’s a good deal fuller than it was. It’s just missing the three files that would let you be me.