/technical-article-writer

name: technical-article-writer
description: "Write technical articles and blog posts for developer audiences — tutorials, explainers, benchmarks, bug hunts, postmortems, and 'we rewrote it in X' posts — with title variants and developer-grade article structure. Use whenever the user asks to write a blog post, technical article, dev.to or Medium post, or any long-form technical content, including 'write about [technical topic]', 'turn this into a blog post', or 'I want to publish something about X', even without naming a format. Do NOT use for newsletter or Substack issues — use samber/cc-skills@substack-ghostwriting instead. Do NOT use for codifying an author's voice — use samber/cc-skills@copywriting-prose-creator instead."
user-invocable: true
license: MIT
compatibility: Designed for Claude or similar AI agents.
metadata:
  author: samber
  version: "1.3.2"
  openclaw:
    emoji: "📝"
    homepage: https://github.com/samber/cc-skills
allowed-tools: Read Edit Write Glob Grep Agent WebFetch WebSearch AskUserQuestion

**Questions:** Ask the user through the environment's question tool — never as plain-text prose. One question at a time, 2–4 tappable options, wait for the answer. If the environment has no question tool, ask in prose with the same options, one at a time.

Technical Article Writer

Write technical articles that developers actually want to read. This skill combines structural frameworks from technical writing, hook engineering from copywriting, and practitioner-tested patterns for developer content.

Core philosophy

Most technical articles fail because of structural problems, not bad ideas: burying the lede, mixing content types, weak openings, no clear motivation, or trying to cover too much.

Developer audiences have a built-in BS detector. The best technical content leads with specificity and honesty. It sounds like a smart colleague explaining something interesting, not a marketer pitching. Acknowledge your expertise level, solve a specific problem, use real examples.

Not for reference documentation aimed at non-native readers or machine translation (→ See `samber/cc-skills@humanizer-en-asd-ste100` skill for ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English).

---

Workflow

Follow these phases in order. Each phase produces a concrete artifact the user reviews before moving on. **Phase 1 is mandatory — always ask the user the intake questions and wait for answers before writing anything.** If the user already provided some context, extract what you can and ask only about missing pieces.

Phase 1: Idea sharpening (interview)

**Stop and ask.** Before writing anything, present the intake questions below to the user and wait for their answers. Do not skip this phase, do not infer silently, and do not start drafting until you have explicit answers or confirmation on every item. Ask the user (or extract from context and confirm):

1. **Topic**: What specific thing are you writing about? 2. **Objective**: What's the primary goal of this article? Present these options through the question tool (push back if the user picks more than one — a single primary CTA converts far better than competing asks):

• Newsletter subscription / audience growth
• Personal branding / thought leadership / authority in a niche
• Product or service signup / free trial
• Direct purchase
• Lead generation (download, gated asset, whitepaper)
• Demo or sales call booking
• Community join (Discord, Slack, forum)
• Engagement (reply, share, comment, restack)
• Reader support (paid subscription, tip, sponsorship)
• No conversion goal (purely informational / educational)

The objective shapes the CTA, how much you give away vs. tease, and where conversion points sit. It will be passed directly to the `copywriting-cta` skill in Phase 5b.

3. **Audience**: Who reads this? (junior devs, senior engineers, CTOs, general tech, DBA, frontend developer...) 4. **Content type**: Which pattern fits? (see `references/article-structures.md` for full templates)

• The Bug Hunt / We Rewrote It in X / How We Built It / Lessons Learned
• Thoughts on Trends / Benchmark / Tutorial / Explainer

5. **Length target**: Short (800-1200), Medium (1500-2500), Long (3000+) 6. **One-sentence thesis**: The single claim or takeaway. If the user can't state this, help them.

If the user already provided most of this, extract from conversation and confirm. But if critical pieces are missing, **stop and ask before proceeding**. Don't guess at the audience, content type, or thesis. A wrong assumption here wastes an entire draft.

Specifically:

• If the topic is vague ("write about Java performance"), ask what specific aspect and what the reader should walk away knowing.
• If the audience is unclear, ask. A post for junior devs has a completely different structure than one for senior engineers.
• If you can't infer a thesis, ask the user: "What's the one thing you want the reader to remember?" If they can't answer, help them find it through questions about what surprised them, what they'd tell a colleague, or what they wish they'd known earlier.
• If the content type is ambiguous (could be a tutorial or an explainer), ask which experience the reader should have: following along hands-on, or building a mental model.

Only proceed to Phase 2 once you have enough clarity on topic, audience, content type, and thesis to write a coherent outline. It's cheaper to ask one question now than to rewrite 2000 words later.

**Idea quality filters.** Apply these before investing in a draft:

Julia Evans's heuristic: the best technical content comes from what you struggled with, not what you mastered. If the topic feels too "textbook", push toward the specific struggle, surprise, or counterintuitive finding.

Julian Shapiro's novelty filter. The idea should fit at least one:

• **Counter-intuitive**: "I never realized the world worked that way"
• **Counter-narrative**: "That's not how I was told it worked"

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