draft-in-voice — Memory-Grounded Ghostwriting

Convention: see conventions/brain-first.md — the voice profile and all substance come from the brain, never from memory or improvisation.

Convention: see conventions/quality.md for citation and back-link rules, and _brain-filing-rules.md — voice profiles are person-subject pages and file under people/.

What this is

Ghostwrite in a specific person's voice with high fidelity. The voice work is done UPSTREAM: a validated voice profile already exists in the brain at people/<slug>-voice (e.g. people/alice-example-voice), and this skill is the disciplined application of it. Never freehand "founder voice" or "their voice" from memory — always load the profile and obey its hard rules.

If no validated profile exists, drafting stops — see Building a voice profile below. A made-up voice is worse than asking.

The user's own voice is a special case. If the subject is the user and the harness ships a dedicated personal voice skill (with its own register tuning and anti-AI patterns), prefer that. Use draft-in-voice for anyone else with a validated profile — colleagues, founders, partners, the people the user ghostwrites for — or for the user when no dedicated skill exists.

Source of truth (read these FIRST, every time)

1. The validated voice profile — gbrain get people/<slug>-voice. The fingerprint, quantitative stats (median length, diction, rhythm), and the "how to write as this person" directive block. This is binding. If the page is missing, or its status is anything other than validated, STOP drafting and go to the builder appendix.
2. First-party context — the subject's main page (gbrain get people/<slug>) plus timeline and backlinks (gbrain timeline <slug>, gbrain backlinks people/<slug>): how they actually frame their work, their origin arc, their texture. Use for substance so the content is true to how they think, not just how they sound.
3. (optional) Topic-specific pages — if the draft is about a specific idea or company, pull the relevant page (gbrain search "<topic>", then gbrain get <slug>) so every claim is accurate, not invented.

The hard rules (read them OFF the profile)

A good voice profile encodes the person's non-negotiables. Honor whatever the profile states. The six recurring categories to extract and obey:

1. Tells to avoid. Most profiles name a #1 giveaway (often em-dashes, a stock opener, a punctuation habit). A draft that trips the named tell is automatically wrong.
2. Length discipline. Match the profile's median length. One thought per short post. Cut.
3. Register, picked not blended. Most people have a casual register and a statement/technical register with different rules (caps, emoji, slang, jargon). Pick ONE per draft; never blend — emoji plus corporate jargon in the same line reads fake.
4. Signature moves. The profile names the person's characteristic constructions — use them.
5. Banned boilerplate. Whatever the profile bans (hashtags, "excited to announce", "1/n" threads, specific buzzwords) stays out.
6. Worldview to channel. Substance should reflect how they actually see the thing.

Procedure

1. Resolve the subject + load people/<slug>-voice and first-party context from the brain. No validated profile → stop drafting and offer to build one (appendix below); do not fake it.
2. Clarify register + intent in one line if ambiguous: casual (chat energy) or statement (launch/technical)? Default casual for replies, statement for announcements.
3. Draft 2-3 options, not one. Keep each tight. Vary the angle, not the voice.
4. Run the voice self-check (below). Fix anything that flunks before showing the draft.
5. Show the options + the self-check verdict. Drafting only — posting or sending is the human's call and goes through the normal approval-gated path. This is a contract the agent upholds, not a mechanical guarantee: never wire a draft directly into a send.

Voice self-check (run before showing any draft)

Score each draft against the loaded profile; fix fails, don't ship them:

• Named-tell check: the profile's #1 tell does not appear (auto-fail if it does).
• Length: within the profile's stated band, ideally at its median. One thought.
• Register purity: one register, not a blend.
• No banned boilerplate: nothing the profile explicitly bans.
• Sounds like them, not generic: would it sit naturally between two of their real posts? If unsure, pull 3 real adjacent samples from the corpus referenced in the profile's provenance block and compare cadence.
• Substance is true: every factual claim traces to a real brain page or first-hand fact — never invent metrics, customers, or specifics. Private details stay private unless the person has said them publicly.

When the voice profile is thin or missing

Do NOT improvise. Either:

• build the profile first (appendix below), or
• tell the user the profile is missing/thin and ask for real samples to anchor on.

This refuse-to-draft-without-memory stance is the point of the skill: it is brain-first discipline applied to voice.

Building a voice profile

The builder half of the skill. Run this when drafting hard-stops on a missing or unvalidated profile, or when the user asks to "build a voice profile".

Step 0 — Consent

Confirm the user is authorized to ghostwrite for this person and record who granted it and for what scope (e.g. "tweets and launch copy, not email"). Consent goes in the profile page (schema below). No consent recorded → build stops the same way drafting stops without a profile.

Step 1 — Gather the corpus (threshold: 20+ samples, 6+ months)

• First-party writing only. Their published posts, essays, emails they wrote, talks they gave. Never third-party descriptions, press coverage, or paraphrases — those capture reputation, not voice.
• Minimum bar: 20+ samples spanning 6+ months. Fewer samples overfit to a mood; a shorter span misses register variation. Below the bar, the profile can only be saved as status: draft — which does NOT unlock drafting.
• Cover the target format. If the user will ask for tweets, at least 5 samples must be short posts; launch copy needs at least a few statement- register samples.
• Check what the brain already holds before asking for uploads: gbrain search "<person name>", gbrain backlinks people/<slug>, and any media/ archives. Ingest new samples through the normal ingest skills first so the profile's provenance can point at real pages.

Step 2 — Extract the fingerprint (schema mirrors the six hard rules)

Analyze the corpus and fill all six categories — each one becomes a section of the profile page:

Fingerprint field	What to extract
tells_to_avoid	The #1 giveaway plus any others: punctuation habits, stock openers, constructions they never use.
length	Median length + band per format (tweet, reply, post, email), from actual counts — not vibes.
registers	Each distinct register (casual / statement / technical) with its own rules: caps, emoji, slang, jargon.
signature_moves	Characteristic constructions, openers, rhythms, recurring turns of phrase.
banned_boilerplate	Everything they demonstrably never do: hashtags, "excited to announce", thread numbering, buzzwords.
worldview	How they actually frame their domain — positions, recurring theses, what they care about. Cite brain pages.

Step 3 — Write the profile page

File at people/<slug>-voice (person-subject page per _brain-filing-rules.md), via gbrain put people/<slug>-voice with the page content on stdin. Required top-of-page metadata block:

# Alice Example — Voice Profile

```yaml
subject: people/alice-example
status: draft            # draft | validated | stale — only `validated` unlocks drafting
profile_version: 1       # bump on every rebuild; prior versions via `gbrain history`
built_at: 2026-08-11
validated_at: null
validated_by: null
consent:
  granted_by: the user
  granted_at: 2026-08-11
  scope: "tweets + launch copy"
provenance:
  corpus_size: 26
  corpus_span: "2026-01 to 2026-08"
  sources:
    - media/x/alice-example/
    - writing/acme-example-launch-draft.md
```

## Fingerprint
### 1. Tells to avoid
### 2. Length discipline
### 3. Registers
### 4. Signature moves
### 5. Banned boilerplate
### 6. Worldview to channel

## How to write as this person
(the binding directive block the drafting half reads)

Back-link the profile from the subject's main page (gbrain link people/alice-example people/alice-example-voice --link-type has-voice-profile or the equivalent add_link op in your surface).

Step 4 — Validate (blind check)

A profile only earns status: validated after it survives a blind test:

1. Hold out 5 real samples the fingerprint was NOT extracted from.
2. Draft 3 test pieces from the profile and interleave them with the held-out real samples.
3. Show the mixed set to the user (or the subject). If the drafts don't stand out, set status: validated, validated_at, validated_by, and bump nothing. If they do stand out, note WHICH tell exposed them, refine the fingerprint, and repeat.

Maintenance

• Staleness: if the newest corpus sample is over ~12 months old, or the person's public voice visibly shifted, mark status: stale and refresh — a stale profile blocks drafting the same as a missing one.
• Versioning: every rebuild bumps profile_version and re-runs the blind check. gbrain history people/<slug>-voice is the audit trail.

Contract

This skill guarantees:

• Routing matches the canonical triggers in the frontmatter.
• Drafting NEVER proceeds without a status: validated voice profile at people/<slug>-voice; missing, draft, or stale profiles hard-stop into the builder.
• 2-3 draft options per request, each passed through the voice self-check before display.
• Output is drafts only — posting/sending stays a human decision on the approval-gated path.
• The only brain write this skill performs is the voice-profile page (and its back-link) under people/, per writes_to:.
• Privacy contract preserved: no real names in examples, no fork-specific filesystem path literals, no upstream-fork references; drafts never surface private details the subject hasn't made public.

Output Format

Drafting mode: 2-3 labeled options, each with register + length noted, followed by a self-check verdict per option (pass, or what was fixed). Nothing is posted, sent, or written to the brain.

Option A (casual, 92 chars): ...
Option B (casual, 140 chars): ...
Option C (statement, 210 chars): ...

Self-check: A pass · B pass (trimmed to band) · C pass

Builder mode: the people/<slug>-voice page in the schema above (metadata block + six fingerprint sections + directive block), plus a one-line report of corpus size, span, and validation status.

When it fails

Follow the agent operator protocol for any gbrain error code, exit code, [AGENT] block or notice block. Specific to this skill:

• No consent recorded on the voice profile, or status: draft: the skill refuses to draft by design. Ask the user to confirm who authorized the ghostwriting and for what scope.
• The profile page returns page_not_found or the corpus search is empty with a degraded notice: do not draft from general knowledge; tell the user the voice memory is missing or the search was keyword-only.
• Saving the profile returns revision_conflict: re-read and merge; the profile is binding, so never overwrite it from an old read.

Anti-Patterns

• Freehanding a voice from memory. No validated profile → no draft. Ever.
• Treating a draft/stale profile as good enough. Only validated unlocks drafting.
• Register blending. One register per draft; mixing reads fake.
• Inventing substance. No made-up metrics, customers, or specifics — every claim traces to a brain page.
• Auto-posting. Wiring a draft into a send/publish path skips the human gate that makes ghostwriting safe.
• Building a fingerprint from third-party writing ABOUT the person. Corpus is first-party only.
• Skipping consent. Ghostwriting without recorded authorization is impersonation, not assistance.
• One draft instead of 2-3. A single option hides the voice-vs-angle tradeoff from the user.

Dedup (sharp boundaries)

• voice-note-ingest (skills/voice-note-ingest/SKILL.md) — ingests the user's AUDIO into brain pages with exact phrasing preserved; it captures voice-as-content. draft-in-voice produces NEW prose in a person's textual voice from a profile. The only overlap is the word "voice". A voice memo that should become a post routes through voice-note-ingest first (capture), then draft-in-voice (rewrite in-register).
• reports / briefing (skills/reports/SKILL.md, skills/briefing/SKILL.md) — produce agent-voice summaries of brain content. draft-in-voice produces person-voice content for a human to publish as their own. If nobody's fingerprint is being imitated, it is not this skill.
• Harness-level humanizer-style skills — remove generic AI tells from any text. draft-in-voice targets ONE specific person's fingerprint from a validated profile; "make this less AI-sounding" without a named subject is not this skill.
• media-ingest (skills/media-ingest/SKILL.md) — corpus gathering for the builder appendix routes through the normal ingest skills; this skill reads the resulting pages, it does not own bulk ingestion.