Turn photos of a whiteboard, sticky-note wall, or napkin sketch into a structured spec the team can execute. Use when given whiteboard photos after a workshop, sketch images of a flow or architecture, or asked to 'write up what we drew'. Produces a structured write-up — decisions, flows, open questions, owners — that preserves everything on the board and flags what was ambiguous. Requires image input.
Start a fresh conversation. Replace the highlighted placeholders.
Use whiteboard-to-spec to turn [attached whiteboard image(s) and session context] into an executable spec with a faithful transcription, decisions, flows, owners, open questions, ambiguity ledger, and suggested next step.
Required inputs
[attached whiteboard image(s) and session context]
User-approved starter prompt based on a pinned source version; check current skill requirements before running. Task evidence ↗
SKILL.md
name: whiteboard-to-specdescription: "Turn photos of a whiteboard, sticky-note wall, or napkin sketch into a structured spec the team can execute. Use when given whiteboard photos after a workshop, sketch images of a flow or architecture, or asked to 'write up what we drew'. Produces a structured write-up — decisions, flows, open questions, owners — that preserves everything on the board and flags what was ambiguous. Requires image input."
Whiteboard To Spec Skill
The whiteboard is where teams decide; the photo of it is where decisions go to die. This skill reads the photo like the person who was in the room — arrows, crossings-out, shorthand, spatial grouping — and produces the write-up that should have been made that afternoon.
What This Skill Produces
A faithful transcription of everything legible on the board, organised by its spatial grouping
The structured spec: decisions made, flows/diagrams redrawn as text or Mermaid, options considered (including crossed-out ones — rejections are decisions), open questions
An ambiguity ledger: what couldn't be read or could mean two things, flagged instead of guessed
Required Inputs
The image(s) — one or more photos of the board/wall/sketch. If none is attached, ask for it; never proceed on a verbal description alone.
Context (ask if missing): what was the session about, who attended, what decision it served
Reading Method
Transcribe first, interpret second. Pass one lists what is physically on the board, region by region (top-left, centre…), including arrows, boxes, colours, underlines, and crossings-out. Do not skip marginalia — the small note at the edge is often the real decision.
Honour the visual grammar. Boxes = entities/steps; arrows = flow or causality (note direction); crossed-out = considered and rejected (keep it, labelled as rejected); circled/starred/underlined = emphasis; separate clusters = separate topics; a "?" = the room didn't agree.
Redraw, don't describe. Flows and architectures become Mermaid diagrams or ordered steps, not paragraphs about arrows.
Never invent legibility. Unreadable text becomes [illegible — looks like "…"] in the ambiguity ledger. A wrong guess presented confidently poisons the whole spec.
Multiple photos: establish overlap first (same board, different angles vs. different boards) and merge without duplicating.
Output Format
Board write-up: [session topic] — [date]
What the board says (transcription by region):
[region] — [contents, verbatim where legible]
Decisions on the board:
#
Decision
Evidence on the board
Confidence
[e.g. "circled, arrow from both options"]
high / read-between-lines
Flows / structures (redrawn):
[the diagram the board was drawing]
Considered and rejected: [crossed-out items, with what replaced them]
Open questions from the board: [every "?", disagreement marker, or dangling arrow]
Ambiguity ledger: [illegible or two-way-readable items — for the room to resolve]
Suggested next step: [the one action the board implies, e.g. "confirm decision #2 with the two owners named"]
Quality Checks
Every legible element on the board appears somewhere in the write-up — nothing silently dropped
Crossed-out content is preserved as "rejected", not omitted
Diagrams are redrawn as Mermaid/steps, not prose descriptions of arrows
Every uncertain reading is in the ambiguity ledger, not presented as fact
Decisions carry their on-board evidence, so a sceptic can check the photo
Anti-Patterns
Do not proceed without an image — this skill reads boards, it doesn't imagine them
Do not "clean up" the room's thinking into what it should have decided — transcribe what it did decide
Do not guess illegible words silently — a confident wrong guess is worse than a flagged gap
Do not ignore spatial grouping — merging two separate clusters into one list destroys the meaning
Do not drop the marginalia — initials, dates, and edge notes are often owners and deadlines
Example Trigger Phrases
"Write up what we drew."
"Turn these whiteboard photos into a spec."
"Here's a photo of our sticky-note wall: make it a plan."