Buildcast

Buildcast

Building in public fails quietly in two ways: posts that vanish without a trace of what was learned, and milestones that pass unposted because nobody was watching for them. Buildcast fixes both by making content a first-class, versioned artifact of the repo — every post gets a file, every file gets a retro, every retro feeds a playbook, and the repo's agent contract (AGENTS.md) makes idea capture part of normal development work.

The system is content-first and platform-second: it works for X, Reddit, TikTok, or any platform, and for a personal account today and a brand account later.

Hard rules (apply in every mode)

• Drafts only. Never post, publish, schedule, or send anything to a social platform or any external service. The human reviews and posts manually — this is a safety rule and a quality rule: automated posting is against most platforms' rules and produces exactly the low-effort pattern rankers penalize.
• Never fabricate metrics. A metrics cell you don't know stays empty or —. Wrong numbers poison every retro built on them.
• Audit and patch, never overwrite. If a content directory or AGENTS.md already exists, extend it; wholesale rewrites destroy history the system exists to keep.
• Real lessons come from the project's own retros. The seeded playbook is a starting point, not doctrine — when a retro contradicts it, the retro wins and the playbook gets updated.

Mode dispatch

Classify the request, then route:

Establish

1. Gather the project profile. Discover from the repo first (README, product docs, git remotes), ask only for what's missing: project name, one-line pitch a stranger understands, platform handle(s), niche (who should find this content), account types in play (personal-build-in-public now, brand later?), and the content directory (default docs/content/; honor an existing one).
2. Install the structure from assets/templates/, replacing every {{PLACEHOLDER}} with profile values:
   • README.md ← content-readme.md (hub: conventions + workflow)
   • TEMPLATE.md ← post-template.md (one post = one file: frontmatter, content, metrics table, retro)
   • INDEX.md ← index.md (ledger of all posts, newest first)
   • PLAYBOOK.md ← seed from references/playbook-seed.md (keep the grounding labels)
   • WATCHLIST.md, replies/QUEUE.md, prompts/find-builders.md, assets/.gitkeep
3. Bind AGENTS.md using assets/templates/agents-md-binding.md: add the router row and the "Content signals" contract to the repo's AGENTS.md (create a minimal one if none exists — but if the repo has a different agent-contract file, bind that instead). This is what turns every future agent session into a source of post ideas.
4. Backfill any posts the user can identify (published text, URLs, metrics they remember) — history is where the first playbook lessons come from. Write retros only for backfilled posts old enough to have real data (~7d); for younger ones, leave the retro pending rather than forcing a lesson from partial numbers.
5. Offer (don't push) the automations described in references/operations.md ("Automations" section): scheduled metrics capture and reply drafting. At install time, document them in the content README's Automations section as available, not enabled; update that section with the schedule once one is actually set up.

Log & draft

Read references/operations.md → "Post lifecycle". In short: one file per post from TEMPLATE.md (posts/YYYY-MM-DD-<platform>-<slug>.md), statuses idea → draft → posted, follow-up chains linked in both directions, thread = one file. When drafting, read PLAYBOOK.md first and write to it; if an X-specific draft optimizer skill (e.g. xpost) is available, run drafts through it before presenting.

Ideate

This is the mode the AGENTS.md binding triggers. Read references/operations.md → "Ideation". In short: mine what actually happened (git log, changelog, sprint docs, closed items) plus what the content arc needs next (INDEX.md — what's posted, what's in reserve, where the last post left off), filter through the post-worthiness criteria, and capture ideas as status: idea entries. Capture is cheap and non-blocking — an idea file takes one minute; judging and drafting happen later.

Measure & learn

Read references/operations.md → "Metrics" and "Retros". In short: snapshot metrics at ~24h and ~7d minimum, judge by heavy signals per view (replies, reposts, bookmarks, follows — not likes), write What worked / What went wrong / one Lesson, and promote durable lessons to PLAYBOOK.md with a link back to the source post.

Engage

Read references/operations.md → "Reply engine". In short: at small follower counts, substantive replies to the right accounts outperform posting. Weekly semi-manual discovery (the prompts/find-builders.md prompt, adapted to the niche) fills WATCHLIST.md; the human drops post URLs into replies/QUEUE.md; drafting replies from the queue is agent work — posting them is not.

Files in this skill

• references/operations.md — day-to-day procedures for every mode + optional automations
• references/playbook-seed.md — the starting playbook (labeled by grounding)
• assets/templates/ — install-ready files; replace {{PLACEHOLDER}}s, keep structure