MCP.Market

writing-fragments skill

by mattpocock·mattpocock/skills·324k stars·MIT

Writing, explore: mine raw fragments, no structure yet.

A100/100content scan

Is the writing-fragments skill safe?

Clean: nothing in its files matched our rules. We read 2 files in the folder on 2026-10-25.

No findings.

Install the writing-fragments skill

A skill is a folder. Copy it into your agent's skills folder and the agent loads it when the task matches its description.

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mattpocock/skills.git /tmp/skills
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -r /tmp/skills/skills/in-progress/writing-fragments ~/.claude/skills/writing-fragments
available in every project

In the Claude apps, zip the folder and upload it from the Skills settings. The folder on GitHub

The instructions your agent would load

SKILL.md as published, without the frontmatter. Read it on GitHub

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 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.

More skills from mattpocock/skills

  • Aask-mattAsk which skill or flow fits your situation. A router over the skills in this repo.
  • Achief-of-staffPursue a long-running goal in a single session by co-ordinating subagents.
  • Aclaude-handoffHand the current conversation off to a fresh background agent that picks up the work immediately.
  • Acode-reviewReview the changes since a fixed point (commit, branch, tag, or merge-base) along two axes: Standards (does the code follow this repo's documented coding standards?) and Spec (does the code match what the originating issue/spec asked for?). Runs both reviews in parallel sub-agents and reports them side by side. Use when the user wants to review a branch, a PR, work-in-progress changes, or asks to \"review since X\".
  • Acodebase-designShared vocabulary for designing deep modules. Use when the user wants to design or improve a module's interface, find deepening opportunities, decide where a seam goes, make code more testable or AI-navigable, or when another skill needs the deep-module vocabulary.
  • Adiagnosing-bugsDiagnosis loop for hard bugs and performance regressions. Use when the user says "diagnose"/"debug this", or reports something broken/throwing/failing/slow.
  • Adomain-modelingBuild and sharpen a project's domain model. Use when discussing codebase terminology, writing or editing a GLOSSARY.md, or recording or editing an ADR.
  • Agit-guardrails-claude-codeSet up Claude Code hooks to block dangerous git commands (push, reset --hard, clean, branch -D, etc.) before they execute. Use when user wants to prevent destructive git operations, add git safety hooks, or block git push/reset in Claude Code.
  • Agrill-meA relentless interview to sharpen a plan or design.
  • Agrill-with-docsA relentless interview to sharpen a plan or design, which also creates docs (ADR's and glossary) as we go.
  • AgrillingGrill the user relentlessly about a plan, decision, or idea. Use when the user wants to stress-test their thinking, or uses any 'grill' trigger phrases.
  • AhandoffCompact the current conversation into a handoff document for another agent to pick up.

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