The Content System

Create the memory file your agent loads automatically at the
start of every session. Work out what that file is called for
the tool I'm using and tell me before you write it.

I'm building a personal writing system for LinkedIn. This file
is the always-loaded memory: who I am, who I'm writing for, and
where everything else lives.

Keep it under 60 lines. It's an index, not a document. Use a
table to point at files that don't exist yet, and I'll fill them
in as we build. Create the empty folders it references.

Interview me, one question at a time, until you can write my
positioning spine. Never give me a list of questions.

Six things have to come out of this, and you do not move on from
one until it is concrete:

  WHO      The ONE person I'm writing for. "Founders" is not a
           reader. "The owner of a 30-person accounting firm who
           has already bought AI tools nobody uses" is a reader.

  WHY ME   What I have actually done that they haven't. Not my
           values, not my mission. The thing on my record.

  PROMISE  Where I'm helping them get to, and who they become.
           Not features. Steve Jobs didn't say "5 gigabytes of
           storage", he said "1,000 songs in your pocket".

  PROOF    What I can point at. Imagine I've lost my voice and
           can only point at things that exist in the room. I
           cannot point at "trusted by industry leaders". I can
           point at the logo. I cannot point at "proven results"
           I can point at the number.

  WHY NOW  What another year on their current path costs them.
           Never scarcity, never a fake deadline. Just the
           arithmetic of staying where they are.

  HOW      My mechanism, in the shape "everyone thinks X, the
           problem is Y, so the answer is Z". If I can't name it
           in one line, say so plainly. That gap shows up in
           every post I write until I close it.

Push back when an answer is vague. Keep asking "so what?" until
we hit something that would make a stranger feel something.

Then give me the three or four subjects I'm allowed to write
about, drawn only from those answers, and refuse anything outside
them later even if I ask.

Write it to positioning.md. End by telling me which of the six
you're still unsure about.

Write genres.md. This is the first gate every idea passes,
before any hook exists.

Four kinds of post travel. Everything else is a rounding error:

  A TAKE          a real opinion on a NAMED thing: a company,
                  a tool, a country, a practice. Arguable. People
                  can disagree with you in the comments.
  REAL LIFE       something that actually happened to me, with
                  the specifics intact.
  REAL DRAMA      a named, checkable event with real stakes. Not
                  a story I heard. One I can link to.
  BUILD IN PUBLIC the actual numbers of the thing I'm making,
                  including the bad ones.

And two that reliably die, which you should refuse outright:

  THE ANONYMOUS TEARDOWN   "A CFO once told me his AI saved 100
                           hours a month, but it saved him no
                           money." Nobody is wronged. Nobody is
                           real. It reads as invented because it
                           usually is.
  THE HOW-TO TIP           "5 steps to a better AI strategy."
                           Nobody takes instruction from someone
                           they have not decided to trust yet.

<example verdict="kill and convert">
  before: A partner at a mid-sized firm told me their AI pilot
          failed because nobody owned it.
  after:  Our AI pilot failed and it was my fault. I owned it
          and I never once opened it after week two.
  why:    same lesson. One is a composite nobody believes, the
          other is a confession they cannot argue with.
</example>

Then interview me for my VEINS, the four or five recurring
storylines everything I write comes out of. Not topics. Veins.
A topic runs out; a vein keeps producing because my life keeps
feeding it.

Get them from what I actually do, not what I'd like to be known
for. Then tag every idea in the harvest with its vein, and never
run the same vein twice in a row.

The reason: I will otherwise write about whatever happened most
recently, which means the same three stories on rotation forever
while I believe I am being spontaneous.

Write a reusable routine called harvest that reads my raw
material and pulls out things worth writing about. Save it
however your tool saves reusable instructions, and tell me how
to run it.

Sources are the places I'm about to give you. For each one, work
out whether you can actually reach it, and say so before writing
any code. If you can't reach one, tell me and skip it rather
than pretending.

ORDER MATTERS AND IT IS NOT NEGOTIABLE. My own material first,
always: notes, voice memos, meeting transcripts, my own sent
messages. Only when that is genuinely dry do you go looking
outside. A system that reaches for the web first produces posts
anyone could have written, which is the whole failure.

Each candidate carries the exact source it came from, quoted.
An idea with no source gets dropped, never invented.

Two tests before an idea makes the list:
- Can I tell this as something that happened to me, or something
  I watched happen? If it can only be told as "here is what you
  should do", kill it. Nobody reads advice from a stranger.
- Is there a real person in it? Not "a CFO" or "a founder". A
  named one, or me. Anonymous composites are the single worst
  performing thing you can write.

Track how stale the material is. If nothing new has come in for
a week, say so at the top of the output. A dry well doesn't
announce itself, it just quietly recycles.

This is the shape I want each candidate in:

<example verdict="keep">
  idea:   The client paid the invoice, then never signed the
          contract. Turns out those were unrelated events.
  source: voice memo, 14 Aug, "she's paid the deposit but
          DocuSeal still says unsigned, three weeks now"
  angle:  something that happened to me
  person: me, and a named client
</example>

<example verdict="drop">
  idea:   Businesses should have clearer contract processes.
  source: none
  why:    no source, nobody it happened to, and it can only be
          told as advice from a stranger. All three are fatal
          on their own.
</example>

Ask me for the sources now, one at a time.

Interview me across the areas of my life that show up in how I
think: the work, the money, the body, the people, the beliefs.

One question per message. Never a list.

Go three whys deep on every answer before you move on. The first
answer is the rehearsed one. The second is closer. The third is
usually the one I haven't said out loud, and that is where the
posts are. When an answer sounds like something I'd say at a
networking event, tell me it sounds rehearsed and ask again.

Then look for COLLISIONS, the same truth showing up in two
different parts of my life. How I handle money and how I handle
my body. What I believe about work and what I believe about
people. Those pairs are the posts nobody else can write, because
nobody else has that exact pair. Most people mine one area at a
time and end up with the same five stories forever.

Write voice.md with:
  - the words I actually use, and the ones I refuse to use
  - the rhythm of how I talk. Short or long, dry or warm,
    where I swear and where I go quiet
  - what I have genuinely lived through, in specifics, with the
    dates and the numbers where they exist
  - opinions I hold that most people in my field don't
  - the collisions, written as pairs

Do not summarise me into adjectives. "Direct and analytical" is
worth nothing to you later. Quote me, verbatim, at length.

And never push past something I've said I don't want to talk
about. Some of it stays mine.

Add a sources step to the harvest routine.

I'll give you five sources I trust. Check them for anything new,
and for each one keep the link and a real quote. Never a summary
without the quote, I need the actual words.

Rank what comes back by ARGUMENT DENSITY: replies divided by
reactions.

  above 1.0  people are fighting. Steal the argument.
  below 0.3  people are nodding. Worthless to me.

A thread with 1,600 reactions and 300 replies is agreement, and
agreement has nothing in it for me to say. A thread with 64
reactions and 132 replies is a room split down the middle, and
that is a post.

Low reaction counts in a small room is a FEATURE, not a bug: a
validated idea that forty other accounts haven't posted yet. A
20,000-reaction thread is already cooked and I'd be last there.

Also flag anything where the room is genuinely divided rather
than piling on one side. Two-sided is what I want. A pile-on
gives me nowhere to stand.

Worked example, so the maths is unambiguous:

<example verdict="steal this">
  "If your job can be done by an AI you're lying about your job"
  64 reactions · 132 replies · density 2.06
  A small room, tearing itself apart. Nobody has posted this yet.
</example>

<example verdict="ignore">
  "New model beats the old model on benchmarks"
  1,601 reactions · 296 replies · density 0.18
  A big room nodding along. Forty accounts have already covered
  it and I would be the last one there.
</example>

Then tell me honestly which of my five is producing nothing, so
I can replace it. Don't be diplomatic about it.

Build hooks.md. This is the single highest-leverage file in the
system, because most readers never tap "see more". The visible
slice is not a preview of the post. For most of the audience it
IS the post.

Do not ask me to invent hook shapes and do not invent your own.
Seed the library with these sixteen, verbatim in shape. They are
reverse-engineered from roughly 900 posts across ten creators.
Fill the slots with my content, never rewrite the machine.

  H1  DIALOGUE COLD OPEN
      A raw spoken line, zero setup. Line two is who said it.
      "Cut him. He's completely unprofessional."
      Because he did not blur his Zoom background.

  H2  NAMED FIGURE REVERSAL
      A real named person, a big number, then the turn.
      Graham Walker sold his company for $1.7 billion.
      His one condition: $240 million went to the staff.

  H3  NEGATION REVERSAL
      Line one takes away the expected answer.
      I did not study in the US.
      I chose China.

  H4  BARE PERSONAL STAT
      One autobiographical number, no framing.
      I have not had an office in three years.
      My team is in Armenia, Dubai and Hong Kong.

  H5  SUPERLATIVE COLON
      Ultra short, ends on a colon, line two pays it off.
      The biggest lie of the year:
      "AI will do it for you."

  H6  IMPOSSIBLE NUMBER
      A hard number that sounds like it cannot be true.
      Five agents replaced my entire outbound team.
      Research. Writing. Follow-up. All of it.

  H7  CATEGORY OBITUARY
      Declare the death of the expensive thing they pay for.
      R.I.P. the agency retainer.
      What killed it was not the technology.

  H8  INDICTMENT PLUS COST
      Indict the reader's whole category with a real figure.
      Most firms are paying for software nobody opens.
      Here is what that line costs you a year.

  H9  CONTRARIAN HOUSE RULE
      A counterintuitive rule you hold. Line two is a razor.
      We do not let clients send cold messages.
      Ever.

  H10 STATUS GAP
      A big achievement undercut by a basic failure.
      One founder had already built a $15M business.
      He still could not get a single sales call.

  H11 CURIOSITY GAP
      A subject pointing at something unshown.
      This is the email that ended a six figure contract.

  H12 ACHIEVEMENT PLUS PARENTHETICAL
      A win, humanised by an aside.
      I (quietly) let an AI run our books for a month.
      Here is the one thing it caught that I did not.

  H13 IRONIC FLEX UNDERCUT
      A proud line, demolished in line two.
      I love running an agency.
      Just did six figures. (in unpaid invoices)

  H14 THEN NOW DIPTYCH
      Two dated lines, two states, the gap is the story.
      2016: could not speak in public. Had a stutter.
      2026: paid to speak at sold out events.

  H15 FEIGNED INCREDULITY
      Perform disbelief at something true, then enumerate.
      Let me get this straight.
      You pay for three tools, use one, and cannot say
      what any of them do.

  H16 TROUBLE PLUS ESCALATOR
      A named thing in trouble, then a parenthetical that
      makes it worse.
      That rollout your board signed off is already failing.
      (And the vendor knows before you do.)

Then add the three laws every filled hook has to pass:

SHAPE. Line one runs 5 to 10 words and 33 to 55 characters, far
shorter than feels right. It opens a gap and does not close it.
Hard line break. Line two drops the twist, cost or reversal. 96
to 100% of winning posts have a line two. Specificity means a
name, a number, or a quote. Never an adjective, never a category.

SUBJECT. The subject of line one is a person, or a thing being
handed a human fate such as dying, in trouble, or humiliated. A
company doing ordinary business fails. A plural mass fails,
because nobody can climb inside a statistic. An abstraction
fails. The rescue is always the same move: whatever the company
did already happened to someone, so zoom to one of them.

STAKE. Before shaping anything, answer in ONE sentence: who is
wronged, shocked, vindicated or trapped, and what exactly does
the reader feel? If you cannot name both the person and the
emotion, it is an observation wearing a story's clothes. Refuse
to write it and tell me to find the human inside the idea.

<example verdict="works">
  Deloitte just got sued for $172 million
  for an AI project that never worked.

  Half the Big Four are next.

  pattern: H2. A named giant, a dated event, a number I can
  check. Something happened TO someone.
</example>

<example verdict="dies">
  Many large consultancies are facing
  scrutiny over AI project delivery.

  why: same fact, no name, no number, nobody it happened to.
  A statement about a category. Nothing to feel, nothing to
  argue with, nothing to check.
</example>

<example verdict="works">
  She got fired from her agency.

  For posting on LinkedIn.

  pattern: H1 into a status gap. One person, one injustice,
  seven words. You feel it before you finish understanding it.
</example>

<example verdict="dies">
  Companies are increasingly restricting
  employee social media activity.

  why: true, and completely unfelt. You cannot be wronged on
  behalf of a plural noun.
</example>

Now build the SHAPE DEALER, and this is the part almost nobody
does. A post has four shape decisions, not one, and you deal all
four BEFORE line one exists.

  1. HOOK PATTERN  which of the sixteen above

  2. STRUCTURE     the argument shape. Seed these nine:
       story scene       chronological, with one line of speech
       paired proof      claim, evidence, claim, evidence
       x versus y        two labelled paths compared
       inventory spine   1/ 2/ 3/ blocks, each a capability
       negation          not this, not this, but THIS
       before and after  the same thing at two points in time
       teardown          here is the thing, here is why it broke
       justification     because, therefore, which means
       myth bust         everyone believes X. X is wrong. Here
                         is what is actually true.

  3. BLOCK         the ONE dominant visual run in the body.
                   Seed these six:
       numbered run      1. 2. 3. a sequence or ranking
       arrow flow        cause and effect, before and after
       dash stack        a scannable dashed list
       contrast columns  two sides mirrored down the page
       colon reveal      three or more short labels with a
                         payload under each
       quoted scene      two or more standalone quoted lines

  4. ACCENT        exactly one borrowed device on top. A single
                   quote, or a single colon label. NEVER a
                   second list. Two list types in one post read
                   as a template.

Rotation rules, and enforce them by keeping a record:
  never the same block twice running
  never the same hook pattern twice in one week
  never the same structure twice running

The reason this matters more than it sounds: choose well every
single time without rotating, and every post you write looks
identical. The reader stops seeing posts and starts seeing a
template, and a template is the fastest way to become
scrollable.

From now on, never invent a shape. Deal all four, name what you
dealt and what it is rotating away from, then show me the
verdict on all three laws before you write anything else.

Write craft.md. This covers everything below the fold, which is
the half nobody writes down and the half that decides whether a
good hook was worth anything.

LENGTH. Work out my real median from posts I have actually
published, and write to it. Not to what some creator with a
different audience does. If I do not have enough posts yet,
start at 900 characters and correct it once I do. Long is not
depth. It is usually two posts stuck together.

ONE IDEA. One post, one idea. If a draft carries two, tell me,
and give me the second one back as a separate draft rather than
burying it.

RHYTHM. One beat per line. A blank line under most of them.
Short lines carry weight, so put the load-bearing sentence on
its own. Vary the length or it drones. Read it aloud and fix
wherever you stumble. Squint at the shape: varied is good, one
solid rectangle is bad.

DRAFT ROUGH FROM LINE ONE. This is generative, not a polish
step. Do not write clean and then rough it up afterwards, which
produces decorated-clean and reads worse than either. Compose
with the texture already on:
  drop the full stop on roughly half the lines
  fragments are fine, and better than a padded sentence
  one word in caps carrying the weight, not five
  an aside in brackets where a real person would put one
  the occasional trailing thought
Lowercase is the rarest move. Once, at a genuinely raw beat, or
not at all. Never as a default drift, which reads try-hard.

CLOSE ON ATTITUDE, NEVER A QUESTION. "What do you think?" and
"Agree?" are the weakest endings available and the platform
downranks the engagement they beg for. End on a flat statement
with a point of view, or on the consequence. Measured across my
own posts the gap is roughly seven to one.

THE $10 TEST. If every word cost me ten dollars, what would you
cut and still keep it working? Cut those words before showing
me anything.

BUT AND THEREFORE, NEVER AND THEN. Every "and then" is a place
the reader can leave.
  weak:   I went to the shop and then I bought milk and then
          I paid and then I went home.
  strong: I went to the shop, BUT I forgot my wallet,
          THEREFORE I drove back, BUT someone I did not
          recognise was standing in my kitchen.

CONCRETE, NOT JUST CLEAR. Clear means they understand it.
Concrete means they can picture it. You can be perfectly clear
and still forgettable.
  clear but vague:  we help businesses grow
  concrete:         took a roofing company from 12 leads a
                    month to 47 in sixty days

BANNED OUTRIGHT, no exceptions:
  em dashes and double hyphens as separators. Use a full stop.
  semicolons
  emojis
  exclamation marks
  "it is not X, it is Y" and "not A. not B. but C."
  "in today's fast-paced world", "it is worth noting that",
  "when it comes to", "at the end of the day"
  delve, tapestry, leverage, robust, seamless, unlock,
  supercharge, game-changer, landscape as a metaphor
  "experts say", "studies show", "research suggests" with no
  named source
  three items in a list when two make the point
  rotating synonyms to sound varied. Pick one word, reuse it.

THE NAME TEST, run it on every draft: cover my name and photo.
Would anyone know this was mine? If no, it is not specific
enough yet and you have written something anyone could have
posted.

Add gates every draft passes before you show it to me. Print each
verdict with the reasoning. A gate that silently passes is not a
gate, it's decoration.

1. STAKE. Name the wronged party and the exact emotion in one
   sentence, or kill the post. This runs FIRST and it is the
   highest-leverage gate you have. A flat observation with a
   perfect hook still dies on the feed.

2. SUBJECT. Who is the human in line one and what happens TO
   them? An organisation doing business fails. So does a plural
   mass and an abstraction.

3. SHAPE. Line one 5-10 words, opens without resolving, hard
   break, line two drops.

4. BLOCK. The body needs ONE dominant visual block, a numbered
   run, two mirrored sides, a dashed stack, a quoted scene. Not
   one shape start to finish. Measured across ~890 posts from ten
   creators: the median post uses three distinct devices, 85% use
   at least two, and pure single-device posts sit in the bottom
   15%. A lone quote or a single label is an ACCENT, not a block.
   And never two list types in one post, pick one.

5. TEXTURE. Clean is the tell. One beat per line, with 55 to 85%
   of lines at eight words or fewer and a median around 6 to 9.
   Drop the full stop on roughly half the lines. One word in caps
   carrying the weight. If every line is sentence-cased with
   every period in place and no fragments, a machine wrote it and
   the reader can feel it in two lines.

6. FLOW. Hunt every "and then". Replace with "but" and
   "therefore". "I went to the shop and then I bought milk and
   then I went home" has nothing pulling you forward. "I went to
   the shop, BUT I forgot my wallet, THEREFORE I drove back, BUT
   someone I didn't recognise was standing in my kitchen" does.
   Every "and then" is a place the reader can leave.

7. COST. If every word cost me ten dollars, what would you cut
   and still keep it working? Cut those words.

8. TRUTH. Every number true and sourced. No invented figures,
   no invented people, no rounded-up claims. One made-up number
   is unrecoverable, it's the only mistake that costs the whole
   account.

Show me all eight verdicts under the draft, every time.

Here is what a real verdict block looks like, so you know the
level of specificity I want. Vague verdicts are worse than none,
because they read as passing.

<example type="a good verdict block">
  1 STAKE      PASS, a bookkeeper is quietly blamed for an
                error the software made. Reader feels the unfair
                bit, because they have been that person.
  2 SUBJECT    PASS, "She reconciled it three times", one
                human, present in line one.
  3 SHAPE      FAIL, line one is 14 words and resolves itself.
                Cut to "She reconciled it three times." and move
                the reason to line two.
  4 BLOCK      PASS, numbered run of four, dominant, no second
                list competing with it.
  5 TEXTURE    FAIL, 22 of 24 lines end in a full stop and every
                line is sentence-cased. Reads machine-written.
                Drop the stop on roughly half.
  6 FLOW       FAIL, three "and then"s in the middle section.
                Convert to but / therefore.
  7 COST       "in order to" x2, "it is important to note" x1.
                Cut, saves 14 words.
  8 TRUTH      PASS, the one figure is sourced to the invoice.
</example>

<example type="a useless verdict block">
  Stake: good. Subject: fine. Shape: looks right.
  Texture: reads well. Truth: no issues.

  why it's useless: no evidence, no line quoted, nothing I can
  act on. A gate that cannot fail is decoration.
</example>

Fail loudly and specifically. I would rather rewrite three times
than publish something that quietly passed.

Build the week programmer, and a tracker underneath it.

THE PROGRAMMER. Given my target number of posts a week, plan
them from the harvest before I write any of them. For each slot:
which vein, which genre, which hook pattern, which block. Deal
the whole week at once so the rotation is visible and you cannot
accidentally run the same vein twice.

Weight it. Most slots go to the posts that reach people who
don't know me. One slot per week goes to the post aimed at
someone who might actually buy. Never invert that ratio, and
never let a week be all one or all the other.

THE TRACKER. Read the state of my week off the actual files, not
off memory, and open every session with it in five lines or
fewer. It has to be able to tell me things I do not want to hear:

  behind        posted 1 of 4, it's Saturday, here's the gap
  repeating     the last two posts ran the same vein, rotate
  stale         nothing new in the material for 9 days
  unmeasured    11 posts carry no numbers, so no median exists
                and I cannot tell you what is working
  no ask        8 posts and not one of them asked for anything

<example type="a good open">
  Week 34 · 1 posted, 1 drafted, floor is 4
  Behind: need 2 more, and it's Friday
  Rotation: last two were both the same vein, pick another
  Material: 9 days stale, refill before drafting
  Next: draft the Tuesday slot from the client-work vein
</example>

<example type="a useless open">
  You're making good progress this week. Let me know
  what you'd like to work on.

  why: tells me nothing I did not already know, and asks me
  to do the thinking the system exists to do.
</example>

Two rules that make this survive contact with a bad week:

Refuse to draft on stale material. If nothing new has come in,
say so and make me refill first. A system fed nothing recycles
what it already said and calls it output.

Never scold. State the gap in one line and move on. If it
lectures me I will stop opening it, and a system I do not open
is worth nothing.

Make the whole line runnable in one go, in order: read my week,
check my sources, pick the idea, choose a hook pattern, draft it
in my voice, run every gate, then show me the draft with the
verdicts underneath it. Save it the same way you saved harvest,
and tell me exactly what to type to run it.

Open by telling me where I stand this week in five lines or fewer,
before you do any work: what's posted, what's drafted, how stale
my material is, and the one thing to do next.

Deal the shape first, hook pattern and structure and block and accent,
and tell me what you dealt and what it's rotating away from. Then
write. Never the other way round: a body written first and a
shape checked afterwards always comes out as one flat ladder.

If the raw material is stale, say so and refuse to draft until I
refill it. Recycling old material quietly is the failure I want you
to make impossible.

Never publish. Show me. I post it myself.

Every post gets two numbers written back into its own file:
impressions, and conversations. A conversation is a DM, a reply
thread, or a call that came out of that post. A real person
talking to me about actual work.

Hold these apart, because mixing them is how people quit good
writing. Impressions are the PROXY. Conversations are the THING.
A post with 1,200 impressions that started two real conversations
beat a post with 40,000 that started none.

Grain matters too. Judge craft per post. Judge the goal every
eight posts. One post starting nothing is noise, eight posts
starting nothing is signal.

When eight posts produce zero conversations, do NOT tell me to
write better hooks. If the gates are passing, craft is not the
constraint and rewriting hooks is the comfortable work. Tell me
to change the room I'm writing to, or change what I'm asking for.

Once I have enough posts, work out my median and name which ones
genuinely beat it. Then tell me what those had in common, and be
specific. "Stronger hooks" is not an answer. "All four opened on
a named person in trouble" is.

Never estimate a number to fill a gap. Blank beats wrong. A
guessed number makes a dead funnel look alive and quietly poisons
every conclusion after it.

The level of specificity I want when you report back:

<example type="a useful finding">
  Four posts beat your median of 1,400.
  All four opened on one named person in trouble.
  The five below median all opened on a category
  ("most firms", "a lot of founders", "companies").
  Your two highest also carried a checkable number in line two.
</example>

<example type="a useless finding">
  Your stronger posts had better hooks and more
  engaging openings. Consider leaning into that.

  why: I cannot do anything differently on Monday morning
  because of that sentence.
</example>