Skills mattpocock skills Writing workflow
writing-fragments
- Use it when:
- You want to write an essay or article but don't know its shape yet.
- It does:
- Interviews you and saves every usable line, anecdote and idea to one Markdown file.
- You get:
- A file of raw notes, with no outline.
- Runs:
- Only when you call it.
Skill 1 of 3 in the Writing workflow bundle, before writing-beats.
TL;DR
This is the exploring half of Matt Pocock's writing workflow. You say what you'd like to write about, and the agent keeps asking: what you noticed, what happened, what you meant by a phrase you used. Anything that might survive into the final piece goes into one Markdown file: a sharp sentence, a claim with its reason, an anecdote, a quote, a half-formed thought. It pushes hardest for one coined phrase that names your idea, since the whole piece can later hang on it. It appends without asking, rereads the file before every write so your own edits survive, and never imposes headings, an outline or an order. Structure is left to writing-beats or writing-shape.
Summarizes the skill at 5beb35b.
npx skills add https://github.com/mattpocock/skills --skill writing-fragments skills.sh pageSource on GitHubAll skills from mattpocock/skills
- Total Downloads
- 527,226 on skills.sh, Nov 9, 2026
- Repo stars
- 318,714 mattpocock/skills
- First seen
- May 6, 2026 on skills.sh
Weekly values
| Week to | Installs |
|---|---|
| Sep 21 | 26,398 |
| Sep 28 | 23,622 |
| Oct 5 | 23,194 |
| Oct 12 | 28,887 |
| Oct 19 | 25,480 |
| Oct 26 | 23,063 |
| Nov 2 | 21,227 |
| Nov 9 | 20,391 |
| Category |
Articles, docs, internal comms, research write-ups and prose that doesn't read as generated. |
|---|---|
| Type |
A multi-step process the agent follows: interview, debug, run a TDD loop, review. |
| Effect |
Its own steps create or change files, git state or local tools. |
| Needs |
Instructions only. Works in any agent that supports skills. |
| Publisher |
Everyone else. Unverified vendor claims default to community. |
| Topics |
SKILL.md
From mattpocock/skills at 5beb35b. Checked daily, last changed Oct 20, 2026.
Frontmatter
name: writing-fragments
description: "Writing, explore: mine raw fragments, no structure yet."
disable-model-invocation: true<what-to-do>
This is pure explore: widen the space of what could be written without committing to structure. Committing is exploit, a separate skill's job. Run a grilling session that produces fragments, interviewing the user relentlessly about whatever they want to write about. Imposing phases, outlines, or article structure is out of scope here.
As fragments emerge from either side of the conversation, append them to a single markdown file.
If the user did not pass a path, ask once where to save the document, then remember it for the rest of the session.
Capture fragments from the very first thing the user says, including the initial prompt.
On first write, put a single H1 at the top with a working title (it can change later) and nothing else: no metadata, no TOC, no date.
</what-to-do>
<supporting-info>
What is a fragment
A fragment is any piece of text that might survive into the final article. It must be readable by the author (the author can tell what it means), but it does not need to define its terms or be comprehensible to a cold reader. The bar is "is this a piece of good writing?", not "is this a self-contained argument?"
Fragments are deliberately heterogeneous. Examples of what could be a fragment:
- A sharp sentence you'd want to deploy somewhere but don't yet know where.
- A claim with a one-line justification.
- A vignette: a thing that happened, a code snippet, a scenario, an analogy.
- A half-thought: "something about how X feels like Y, work this out later."
- A quote, a piece of dialogue, an overheard line.
- A list of related observations that hang together by feel.
- A complaint, a confession, a punchline.
- A leading word: a compact metaphor or coinage the whole piece can hang on (one term that names the idea, the way tracer bullets or fog of war names a whole pattern).
Of these, the leading word is the most valuable fragment to land. It is load-bearing: name the right one in explore and it shapes the structure, the transitions, and the title later, paying dividends through the entire exploit phase. When the conversation circles a recurring idea, push to coin a word for it.
The novelist's diary is the model: years of unstructured noticings that later get mined for raw material. Fragments are noticings.
File format
# Working title
A first fragment lives here.
It can be multiple paragraphs. It can include lists, code, quotes: whatever
shape the fragment naturally takes.
---
A second fragment.
---
> A quoted line that the user wants to keep around.
A reaction to it.
---
- A cluster of related observations
- That hang together by feel
- And want to be near each other
Fragments are separated by a horizontal rule (\n---\n). No headings inside the body. No tags. No order beyond the order they were added.
Writing rhythm
Append silently. Don't ask permission for each fragment. Mention what you added in passing ("adding that"), but don't interrupt the conversation with save dialogs.
Before every write: re-read the file from disk. The user may have edited, reordered, or deleted fragments between turns, so preserve their changes. Never overwrite the file; only append (or, if the user asks, edit a specific fragment in place).
The user can say "cut the last one", "rewrite that one sharper", "merge those two" at any time. Treat those as first-class instructions.
</supporting-info>