This is pure explore: without committing to any structure, widen the space of what can be written—committing to structure is exploit, which is another skill's job. Run a grilling session that produces fragments, continuously interviewing around whatever topic the user wants to write about. Imposing phases, outlines, or article structure is out of scope here.
When the two parties in the conversation produce fragments, append them to a single markdown file.
If the user did not pass in a path, ask only once where the document should be saved, then remember it for the rest of the session.
Capture fragments starting from the user's very first sentence, including the initial prompt.
On the first write, put a single H1 with a working title at the top (it can be changed later), and put nothing else: no metadata, TOC, or date.
What is a fragment
A fragment is any piece of text that might make it into the final article. It must be _readable to the author_, meaning the author can tell what it means; but it does not need to define terms, nor does it need to be immediately understandable to a cold reader. The criterion is "is this good writing material?", not "is this a self-consistent argument?"
Fragments are deliberately kept heterogeneous. Examples of what might become a fragment:
- A sharp sentence you want to use somewhere but don't yet know where to put.
- A claim and a justification.
- A vignette: something 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 set of observations that feel like they belong to the same cluster.
- A complaint, confession, or punchline.
- A leading word—a compact metaphor or coinage that the whole article can hang on (a term that names this idea, just as tracer bullets or fog of war names the whole pattern).
Among these, the leading word is the fragment most worth landing. It is load-bearing: naming the right one during the explore phase will shape the later structure, transitions, and titles—paying off continuously throughout the exploit phase. When the conversation keeps circling around a recurring idea, push to coin a word for it.
The novelist's diary is the model: years of unstructured noticings, later mined into raw material. Fragments are the 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 within the body. No tags. No ordering other than the order in which they were added.
Writing rhythm
Append quietly. Don't ask permission for every fragment. You can mention in passing what you added ("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; preserve their changes. Never overwrite the file; only append (or, when the user asks, edit a specific fragment in place).
At any time the user can say "cut the last one", "rewrite that one sharper", "merge those two". Treat these as first-class instructions.