writing

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...

Told to search for "nano banana", an agent without query rewriting gets two worlds of meaning. Here are the 5 rewrite patterns I installed.

TL;DR: The author's fix for ambiguous agent searches: expand every query into five variants—literal, contextual, English, industry synonym, full question—before searching. All five run and merge, so "nano banana" resolves correctly as Google's image model rather than a fruit. The approach costs almost nothing—no extra API calls—though the author honestly admits no benchmark data exists yet.

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.