An Agent Skill for writing practitioner-led technical pieces, from short concept notes to long-form essays, with clear thinking, intellectual honesty, concrete examples, and careful treatment of trade-offs.

This skill is inspired by Martin Fowler’s essays, and its content was derived from an analysis of his work. It is intended as a nod to his lasting contribution to software design and technical writing.

Martin Fowler is a software architect, author, and speaker best known for books including Refactoring, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, and UML Distilled. His bliki is one of the most respected sources of software design thinking on the internet.

His writing is distinctive for its clarity, concreteness, and willingness to be opinionated while honestly acknowledging trade-offs. This skill distils those qualities into a set of guidelines that any AI writing assistant can follow.

The repository follows the Agent Skills format from agentskills.io

• SKILL.md contains the activation metadata and core instructions
• references/ holds longer guidance loaded only when needed
• assets/ holds reusable templates and prompt material

This repository contains one portable skill:

• bliki-writer/SKILL.md for activation metadata and core instructions
• bliki-writer/references/essay-playbook.md for the full writing playbook
• bliki-writer/references/fowler-style-boundaries.md for handling Fowler-style requests
• bliki-writer/assets/article-template.md for a reusable article structure
• bliki-writer/assets/chat-prompt-template.md for chat-based tools

The skill helps an agent:

• choose the right post type (argument essay, concept definition, practical tip, curated observation)
• match length to the idea (300-word concept notes to 2500-word essays)
• open with a recognizable tension, assumption, concept, or practical concern
• reframe weak or misleading questions
• build reasoning through claim-driven sections (in longer pieces)
• ground abstract claims in concrete engineering examples
• credit ideas to specific people conversationally
• cross-reference related concepts and build a knowledge ecosystem
• discuss limits, trade-offs, and uncertainty honestly
• engage opposing views fairly
• end with "Further Reading" and "Acknowledgements" sections
• produce prose-first writing instead of listicles or generic summaries
• avoid hype, clickbait, and false precision

For tools that support Agent Skills, copy the skill directory into your skills folder:

mkdir -p .agents/skills
cp -R bliki-writer .agents/skills/

For chat tools without native skill loading, use bliki-writer/assets/chat-prompt-template.md as a starting prompt and append the writing task.

Example prompt:

Use the repository skill `bliki-writer`.
Write an essay arguing that internal quality matters because it changes the economics of future work.

Another example (short concept note):

Use the repository skill `bliki-writer`.
Write a short concept note defining "DesignStaminaHypothesis", the idea that good internal design pays for itself within weeks.

Another example (practical tip):

Use the repository skill `bliki-writer`.
Write a practical-tip post about reading your drafts aloud to catch awkward phrasing.

This keeps the main skill file short while preserving detailed guidance for tasks that need it.

The skill layout and packaging follow the Agent Skills specification and related documentation:

• Overview
• Specification
• Quickstart
• Best practices
• Optimizing descriptions