writing

A 228-line prompt that fought itself became a 205-line shared contract plus four swappable mode files. The design logic, explained.

TL;DR: Splitting one bloated 228-line prompt solved conflicting instructions by separating rule ownership: a shared contract locks universal invariants like citation and privacy rules, while swappable mode files handle tone and structure. Four modes—report, news, tutorial, explainer—are chosen by the promise made to readers. Hard structure limits and strict evidence requirements keep every output consistent and checkable.

An article's source does not determine its type, the brief's content does. Detect the mode from content, keep one canonical guide, never duplicate enforcement.

TL;DR: The author nearly split their writing guide into two prompt files, one technical and one reflective, before realizing an article's type comes from the brief's content, not its source. A commit can spark a reflection; a dossier can spark a troubleshooting piece. One adaptive guide with two detected modes beats two files that drift.

Last week, my blog article pipeline failed completely. I thought pasting a 100KB skill containing hundreds of style rules into the prompt would solve the...

The chat surfaced a valid new angle and one unverifiable statistic. Finding angles and proving claims are different jobs; only one of them belongs to the chat.

TL;DR: An AI chat surfaced a genuinely new research angle, but then invented a stat attributed to Stanford HAI that couldn't be verified anywhere. The lesson: finding angles and proving claims are separate jobs, so the pipeline now asks AI for angles, then opens every primary source manually. Citations offer traceability, not truth; walking the trail is your job.

Paste the same style rules ten times and you have a bug, not a habit. One agent skill file now carries the entire editorial voice.

TL;DR: Long prompts packed with style rules kept failing because the agent broke them anyway. Editorial voice is procedural knowledge, so it belongs in an Agent Skills file that loads on demand, not in every prompt. Moving everything to one SKILL.md shrank the prompt from seventy lines to twenty and created a single source of truth.