Getting Started

The collection is meant to be used inside a writing project folder, not only as a global assistant prompt. A project folder gives the agent one writing context — a personal blog, a founder-led content system, a newsletter, a client project — with its own purpose, audience, topics, and voice.

Use separate folders when concerns should stay separate:

~/writing/personal-blog/
~/writing/company-content/
~/writing/client-acme/

Each folder gets its own .online-writing/ configuration, so one installation can support different voices and strategies without mixing them. See Configuration.

First-time setup

1. Create or choose a project folder for the writing context.
2. Make the skills available to your agent — see Installation.
3. Start your agent from the project folder, or tell it explicitly which folder is the project.
4. Ask the agent to set up the online-writing configuration for this project.
5. Run Discovery to establish the foundation.
6. Use Production and Review to draft, refine, rate, and repurpose.

A good first prompt:

I want to set up this folder as an online writing project. Please guide me through the
initial setup: purpose, content buckets, and voice/tonality.

The workflow

The skills are organized around three areas of work, each with its own guide. Start with Discovery — it’s the foundation everything else reads — but Production and Review are areas you move between and revisit as you write, not one-way steps:

• Discovery — establish the durable foundation: why you write (purpose.md), what you own (buckets.md), and how your voice sounds (tonality.md). This is a prerequisite for good output, not an optional extra.
• Production — find the idea (ideate, explore-idea) and shape it into a draft (create-post, create-draft, create-medium-post, headlines).
• Review — make a draft stronger (diagnose, improve-writing, rate) and stretch it further (tldr, distill, illustrate). You can review any piece, including one you didn’t write here.

Start with Discovery

The production skills work without configuration, but without purpose, content buckets, and especially voice, they fall back to generic, sales-y defaults. A few discovery interviews up front pay off across every post you write afterward — so run Discovery first.

After the foundation exists, prompts can be direct:

Use my online-writing context to explore three angles for a post about AI adoption risk.
Diagnose this draft and tell me why it does not land yet.
Turn this article into five X posts and two LinkedIn shorts.

The skills guide both setup and execution — you do not need to fill every configuration file by hand. The discovery skills interview you, create the initial configuration, and make later writing tasks more consistent.