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04.24Content

Building in public: Claude Code skill for technical blogging

Claude Code skill AR Labs uses to turn daily engineering work into technical blog articles, with an eight-part framework and the shorter posts pre-written.

Engraved plate: a composing stick holding type blocks that spell POST, beside a printed article and three smaller slips.An engraved printer’s composing stick holds metal type blocks spelling post; beside it a printed article sheet and three smaller derived slips.AR LABS · INSTRUMENT CABINET · DRAWER 04CALL NO. 04.240123456789POSTABCDFIG. 24 · BUILDING IN PUBLICCOMPOSINGSTICKPARTSAWork alreadydoneBSet with aneight-part frameworkCThe articleDShorter posts,pre-writtenDOCUMENT, DON’T CREATE EXTRA
On this page
  1. How it works
  2. The judgement it encodes
  3. What exists today
  4. Example

The building-in-public skill is the Claude Code skill AR Labs built and uses to turn its engineering work into technical articles. Use it when planning or drafting a post about work already done. Its premise is "document, don't create extra": the articles come from work already under way, not from a separate content effort. The skill plans an article with an eight-part framework, drafts it under our writing rules, and pre-writes the shorter posts that will point to it, so one article yields many pieces without extra sessions. Articles are published on this site's blog, which is the canonical home; when an article is cross-posted elsewhere, the copy points back to the blog.

How it works

FIG. 01
flowchart LR
  W["Engineering work"] --> P["Choose the theme"]
  P --> F["Article framework, 8 elements"]
  F --> D["Draft under the writing rules"]
  D --> E["Edit and publish on the blog"]
  E --> X["Derived posts from the framework"]

Choose what to write. Our writing has four themes: building agentic systems, cognitive science and AI, the practice of AI engineering, and the process of building the lab. One content-strategy document holds them, and the skill checks which theme the next piece should emphasise.

Plan with the framework. Each article starts as a framework file with eight elements. Four plan the content: the thesis in one or two sentences, a narrative arc of three to five acts, five to seven key learnings, and a section structure with word counts. Four plan the publishing: search keywords, social-media hooks, the sources the evidence will come from, and a checklist of next steps.

Decide the shape. The target for most articles is 1,500 to 3,000 words. Before planning a long piece, the skill estimates the total length from what is already drafted; if it would run past about 5,000 words, the material is split into a series, each article built around one distinct theme with a planned publishing order.

Draft. The draft applies our writing-quality rules from Write Well at sentence level and the blog's style guide at the level of post structure, and consults the archive of earlier articles to keep the voice consistent.

Derive. The social hooks written in the framework become thread openers and shorter posts, quotable lines from the key learnings become quote cards, and single sections become ideas for follow-up articles. All derived material lives in the framework file rather than in a separate folder.

The judgement it encodes

Document, don't create extra. Writing that requires work beyond the engineering is writing that stops when the engineering gets busy. The process has to be sustainable to last.

One anchor, many derivatives. The long article is the source; everything shorter is cut from it, written at the same time, rather than composed afresh later.

Value, not promotion. The tone the skill asks for is the old hacker ethos: be useful, show the failures and the uncertainty as well as the results, and let the work make the case.

Log posts when they go out, never afterwards. The skill records a post when it is published. It does not rebuild a publication history later from drafts and conversations, because a catalogue assembled after the fact is a reconstruction, not a record.

One source for strategy. The themes and their balance are defined in one strategy document only, and every other file points to it.

What exists today

The skill exists with two slash commands alongside it: one plans the week's content and one gives the next concrete step when a draft has stalled. It calls on other skills as needed: Write Well during drafting, C4 diagrams for architecture figures, and the multi-agent research skill for sourcing.

Example

Illustrative example. The content-planning half of an article framework (elements 1 to 4):

# Framework: Why our research agents cannot hire helpers
 
1. Thesis: A limit an agent can read is a suggestion; a limit in its
   tool list is a fact.
2. Arc: the fan-out design -> the cascade it allowed -> moving the
   limit from prompt to tools -> what else that pattern fixes.
3. Key learnings:
   - Structural limits beat instructions for anything that compounds.
   - Breadth and rigour are different tools; route, don't scale.
4. Structure: problem, mechanism, fix, generalisation, checklist.