# Mine Beats > Use when the user says: "write in beats", "beat by beat", "choose your own adventure writing", "journey-style article", or wants to assemble an article as a series of beats the user picks between. - Skill: `nodejsmith/mine-beats` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add nodejsmith/mine-beats` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/nodejsmith/mine-beats/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Coding & Dev Tools - Author: NodeJSmith (https://skillmd.com/u/nodejsmith) - Updated: 2026-09-10 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/nodejsmith/mine-beats --- # Beats **Exploit**: the exploring is done, the pile is fixed — commit to a path through it and mine the pile to fill each beat, choose-your-own-adventure style. Pairs with `mine-fragments` (explore) and `mine-shape` (the paragraph-by-paragraph alternative to this skill). ## Arguments $ARGUMENTS — path to the raw material file. If empty, ask the user for it — and mention `/mine-fragments` as the typical way to produce one, if they don't have raw material yet. If a given path doesn't resolve, say so explicitly and offer the same suggestion rather than surfacing a raw tool error. The raw material file is treated as the input pile — anything from a tidy list of fragments to a wall of unstructured prose to a transcript. The format does not matter. Read it end-to-end before doing anything else. **Do not edit the raw material file — it is read-only to this skill.** If the user did not say where to save the article, run `get-skill-tmpdir mine-beats`, write to `/article.md`, and tell the user where it's saved — do not ask once and rely on remembering the path for the rest of the session, since the session may not persist. --- ## The Loop 1. **Establish the prerequisites.** Before any beats, settle with the user what the audience already knows walking in — the concepts that are **grounded** from the start. Everything else must be grounded by a beat before a later beat can use it. See [Grounding](#grounding). 2. Write 2–3 candidate **starting beats**, drawn from the raw material. Each is a different entry point into the article. Each may only lean on grounded concepts; note what new concepts each one grounds. Show the user the beats before writing to the article file. The user picks one. Preview what beats that pick unlocks — as if the user is seeing a little way down the path. 3. Once the user picks a starting beat, write **only that beat** to the article file. A beat may be one sentence or several paragraphs — whatever that beat naturally is. Stop there. 4. Re-read the article file from disk. Then offer 2–3 candidate **next beats** — different directions the journey could pivot to from where the article now stands. Each must be reachable from the current grounded set; note what each one grounds. 5. Loop steps 3–4 until the article reaches a natural end. ## Grounding This grounding discipline is duplicated (not shared) with `mine-shape`'s Grounding section by design (no side files for this pipeline) — if you change the grounding model here, update the other file too. Every **concept** has to be **grounded** before a beat can lean on it: the audience either walked in knowing it or met it in an earlier beat. A beat that reaches for an ungrounded concept loses the reader — that is the one move the journey can't make. The unit is the concept, not the word for it: a beat can lean on an idea the reader lacks even with no jargon in sight. Where a concept has a name — a **term** — grounding it means landing the idea and the term together. A concept gets grounded one of two ways: - **Prerequisite** — grounded before the first beat. The audience brings it. Fixed at the start. - **Introduced** — a beat establishes it, and from then on it's grounded for every later beat. So each beat does two jobs: it **requires** concepts that are already grounded, and it **grounds** new ones. Keep a running list of what's grounded so far, and update it each time a beat lands. This is what shapes the choose-your-own-adventure. A candidate beat is only reachable if everything it requires is already grounded; picking a beat that grounds concept X unlocks every beat that was waiting on X. When you offer next beats, they must all be reachable from the current grounded set — and say what each one grounds, so the user can see which paths it opens. The big lever is what you make a prerequisite versus what you ground inside the piece. Demand too much up front and you shut out readers who don't have it; ground too much inside and the early beats drown in definitions. Settle this with the user when you establish prerequisites, and revisit it whenever a tempting beat turns out to require a concept nothing has grounded yet — the fix is either a grounding beat before it, or promoting the concept to a prerequisite. ## What Is a Beat A beat is one move in the journey. It does one thing — sets a scene, lands a point, asks a question, drops an aside, twists the angle. Then it stops, leaving the reader at a place where the next beat can pivot. A beat is sized by what it needs: - A single sentence if that's all the move is ("And then nothing happened for three weeks."). - A short paragraph if the move needs setup. - Multiple paragraphs if the beat is a self-contained vignette, argument, or example. If a "beat" needs five paragraphs and three subheadings, it's not a beat — it's two beats glued together. Split it. ## Pulling from the Pile Pull material from the raw pile to populate each beat. You can paraphrase, split, recombine, or quote. The pile is a quarry. ## Ending the Journey The article ends when the journey is complete — not when the pile is empty. Most piles will have leftover fragments that don't make it in. That is fine; that is the point of having more raw material than you need. ## Writing Rhythm - Append one beat at a time. Never write ahead. - Re-read the article file from disk before every write. Preserve user edits absolutely. - If the user edits a previous beat substantially, let it change what comes next. - If the user says "rewrite that beat" or "go back and try a different beat 3", do it — edit in place, leave the rest alone.