Writing Beats
SkillDev toolswriting-beats is a skill that gives your AI pre-written guidance for writing and engineering tasks, taken from the author's own agents directory. Once added, your AI can follow this ready-made guidance instead of working out its own approach each time. It comes from the github.com/mattpocock/skills collection.
Use Writing Beats in Claude, ChatGPT or Ahel Desktop
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Then ask your AI: use the Writing Beats skill
Details
Instructions available. Your AI can read the instructions. Execution depends on the setup they require.
Account requirements not reviewed. Check the skill instructions before use; Ahel provides instructions and does not run this skill.
No other account needed.
After adding the skill, give your AI a writing or engineering task and it will follow the included guidance. You can browse the source collection at github.com/mattpocock/skills to see where the guidance comes from.
What your AI can do with it
- Follow pre-written guidance when handling writing tasks
- Follow pre-written guidance when handling engineering tasks
- Apply the author's own working practices from his agents directory
What this skill tells your AI
The instructions your AI receives, as published by alecs5am/ralphy in notes/skills/writing-beats/SKILL.md and read by Ahel’s review.
The user has passed (or will pass) a markdown file of raw material.
If the user did not say where to save the article, ask once and remember the path.
Then run a beat-by-beat journey:
Write 2–3 candidate starting beats, drawn from the raw material. Each is a different entry point into the article. Show the user the beats before writing it to the article file. The user picks one. Preview what beats that might lead to once written - as if the user is seeing a little way down the path. Once the user picks a starting beat, write only that beat to the article file. A beat may be one sentence or several paragraphs — whatever that beat naturally is. Stop there. Re-read the article file from disk. Then offer 2–3 candidate next beats — different directions the journey could pivot to from where the article now stands. Loop steps 2–4 until the article reaches a natural end. What is a beat A beat is one move in the journey. It does one thing — sets a scene, lands a point, asks a question, drops an aside, twists the angle. Then it stops, leaving the reader at a place where the next beat can pivot.
A beat is sized by what it needs:
- A single sentence if that's all the move is ("And then nothing happened for three weeks.").
- A short paragraph if the move needs setup.
- Multiple paragraphs if the beat is a self-contained vignette, argument, or example.
- If a "beat" needs five paragraphs and three subheadings, it's not a beat — it's two beats glued together. Split it.
Writing one beat
Once a beat is picked, write that beat only to the article file. Do not write the next beat.
Pull material from the raw pile to populate the beat. You can paraphrase, split, recombine, or quote. The pile is a quarry.
Ending the journey
The article ends when the journey is complete — not when the pile is empty. Most piles will have leftover fragments that don't make it in. That is fine; that is the point of having more raw material than you need.
Writing rhythm
Append one beat at a time. Never write ahead. Re-read the article file from disk before every write. Preserve user edits absolutely. If the user edits a previous beat substantially, let it change what comes next. If the user says "rewrite that beat" or "go back and try a different beat 3", do it — edit in place, leave the rest alone.
Signals
- GitHub stars
- 136
- Forks
- 13
- Last commit
- Sep 2026
Advanced
- Item type
- skill
- Key
writing-beats- Source
- github.com/alecs5am/ralphy