Turn a document the team keeps rewriting into a template that actually helps — extract the recurring skeleton, mark what varies with real placeholder prompts, keep it lighter than the ceremony it replaces, and pilot it before decreeing it. Use when asked make a template from this doc, we write this same thing every week, standardize our status updates or briefs, or why does nobody use our templates. Produces the extracted template with prompting placeholders, the keep-it-light rules, the example-filled twin, and the adoption path.
Start a fresh conversation. Replace the highlighted placeholders.
Use template-designer to turn [three or more recurring documents] into a lightweight template, filled example, light-ness audit, and pilot adoption path; the reader uses it to [reader use].
Required inputs
[three or more recurring documents]
[reader use]
User-approved starter prompt based on a pinned source version; check current skill requirements before running. Task evidence ↗
SKILL.md
name: template-designerdescription: "Turn a document the team keeps rewriting into a template that actually helps — extract the recurring skeleton, mark what varies with real placeholder prompts, keep it lighter than the ceremony it replaces, and pilot it before decreeing it. Use when asked make a template from this doc, we write this same thing every week, standardize our status updates or briefs, or why does nobody use our templates. Produces the extracted template with prompting placeholders, the keep-it-light rules, the example-filled twin, and the adoption path."
Template Designer Skill
Templates fail in two familiar ways: the empty-headings ghost (## Background — helpfully blank) that guides nobody, and the forty-field bureaucratic form that takes longer than freeform writing did. A working template is extracted from documents the team already writes repeatedly, keeps only the sections that recur with purpose, and — the difference-maker — its placeholders are prompts ("One sentence: what changed since last update, and does the date still hold?") rather than labels ("Update:"). It ships with a filled example, because the example teaches what the skeleton can't.
What This Skill Produces
The template — the recurring skeleton with prompting placeholders, each section justified by recurrence
The filled twin — a realistic example completed end-to-end; templates travel in pairs or don't travel
The light-ness audit — what was deliberately left out, and the freeform escape-hatch section
The adoption path — pilot with the next real instance, revise from friction, then propose as default (not decree)
Required Inputs
Ask for these if not provided:
The recurring documents — 3+ past instances of the thing being templated; extraction needs a pattern, and one document is an anecdote
The reader's use — what the reader does with this document (skim for risk? approve? file?) — sections serve the reader's recurring needs, not the writer's completeness
The pain being fixed — inconsistency between authors? Missing sections discovered late? Slow drafting? The template optimizes for its actual complaint
The mandate reality — can this be piloted, or is someone demanding a decree? (Piloted templates survive; decreed ones get malicious compliance)
Framework: The Design Rules
Extract from the recurrences: lay the past instances side by side — sections appearing in all of them with real content are the skeleton; sections appearing once are not; sections appearing empty-or-boilerplate in all ("Risks: none") get interrogated, not inherited. The template is the pattern, cleaned.
Placeholders prompt, labels don't: every placeholder is a question or instruction that produces the right content from a rushed author — "[The one decision you need from readers, as a question]" beats "[Decision]". The prompts carry the institutional knowledge of what good looks like; this is 60% of the template's value.
Lighter than the ceremony it replaces: the template's fill-time must undercut freeform drafting or adoption is irrational — target: fewer sections than the worst past instance, plus one ## Anything else escape hatch (its absence is why people abandon templates the first time reality doesn't fit the boxes).
The filled twin is mandatory: a complete, realistic example lives beside the blank — authors pattern-match from examples far better than they interpret skeletons, and the example settles length questions ("oh, three bullets, not three paragraphs") that prompts can't.
Pilot, revise, then propose: the next real instance uses the draft template; every friction point (a section that didn't fit, a prompt that confused) revises it; then it's proposed as the default with the pilot as evidence. Templates decreed before contact with reality collect workarounds instead of documents.