gabrielmoreira 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