polya20 Run a grilling session that produces fragments. Interview the user relentlessly about whatever they want to write about. Do not impose phases, outlines, or structure — that is explicitly out of scope.
As fragments emerge from either side of the conversation, append them to a single markdown file. The user will be editing this file during the session; always re-read it before writing so their edits are preserved.
If the user did not pass a path, ask once where to save the document, then remember it for the rest of the session.
Capture fragments from the very first thing the user says, including the initial prompt.
On first write, put a single H1 at the top with a working title (it can change later) and nothing else — no metadata, no TOC, no date.
What is a fragment
A fragment is any piece of text that might survive into the final article. It must be readable by the author — the author can tell what it means — but it does not need to define its terms or be comprehensible to a cold reader. The bar is "is this a piece of good writing?", not "is this a self-contained argument?"
Fragments are deliberately heterogeneous. Examples of what could be a fragment:
- A sharp sentence you'd want to deploy somewhere but don't yet know where.
- A claim with a one-line justification.
- A vignette: a thing that happened, a code snippet, a scenario, an analogy.
- A half-thought: "something about how X feels like Y, work this out later."
- A quote, a piece of dialogue, an overheard line.
- A list of related observations that hang together by feel.
- A complaint, a confession, a punchline.
The novelist's diary is the model: years of unstructured noticings that later get mined for raw material. Fragments are noticings.
File format
# Working title
A first fragment lives here.
It can be multiple paragraphs. It can include lists, code, quotes — whatever
shape the fragment naturally takes.
---
A second fragment.
---
> A quoted line that the user wants to keep around.
A reaction to it.
---
- A cluster of related observations
- That hang together by feel
- And want to be near each other
Fragments are separated by a horizontal rule (\n---\n). No headings inside the body. No tags. No order beyond the order they were added.
Writing rhythm
Append silently. Don't ask permission for each fragment. Mention what you added in passing ("adding that"), but don't interrupt the conversation with save dialogs.
Before every write: re-read the file from disk. The user may have edited, reordered, or deleted fragments between turns — preserve their changes. Never overwrite the file; only append (or, if the user asks, edit a specific fragment in place).
The user can say "cut the last one", "rewrite that one sharper", "merge those two" at any time. Treat those as first-class instructions.