---
name: corpus-voice-skill-rewrite
description: "Rewrite a skill to emulate an author corpus's voice: full read, style-DNA distillation from writing-for-agents levers, positive-phrasing pass, sharpened completion criteria"
---

# Corpus-voice skill rewrite

Rewrite a skill so it reads as if a chosen author wrote it. Done for `grilling` against the `mattpocock/skills` corpus (2026-10-18, command-center PR #20); behaviour preserved, voice swapped.

## Where the corpus lives

Installed third-party skills: `~/.agents/skills/<name>/SKILL.md` (the skills-CLI global store; `~/.agents/.skill-lock.json` names sources). Whole mattpocock corpus ≈ 2,800 lines — small enough to read inline in ~4 `cat` batches via bash; do NOT delegate the reading, style lives in the exact prose.

Read the author's own meta-skill FIRST if one exists (`writing-for-agents` for mattpocock — it states his levers explicitly), then the corpus practicing them.

## Style DNA checklist (mattpocock; generalise per author)

- **Leading words**: compact pretrained concepts repeated as tokens, never sentences (_red_, _seam_, _fog of war_, _brief_, _frontier_). Define each once, reuse everywhere. Prefer words already in the author's other skills so the corpus shares one language.
- **Vocabulary-first**: bolded glossary terms, then used exactly; explicit "_Avoid_: component, service".
- **Positive phrasing**: prohibitions rewritten as target behaviours; keep a prohibition only when no positive form exists (hard guardrails).
- **Sharpened completion criteria**: fuzzy bounds ("understanding reached") → checkable + exhaustive ("frontier empty and nothing sits blocked", "one artefact per question, counted before sending").
- **Zero history**: no provenance, attribution, or absorbed-from lineage in the body.
- **No-op hunting**: delete harness defaults and anything the environment already confesses (formats, rendering, caps). Gotchas the environment CANNOT confess (exclusive dialogs, Esc-abort semantics) stay inline — they're the cache worth keeping.

## Procedure

1. Read entire corpus; tabulate levers with per-skill evidence before writing.
2. Rewrite preserving settled behaviour 1:1 — voice only; diff the two versions for semantic drift.
3. Audit pass: grep the new text for history words (extracted/absorbed/from/upstream), machine-specific constants, repo-specific paths.
4. Run repo checks, commit as `style(<scope>)`, note the lever→instance mapping in the PR comment so the reviewer can grade the emulation.