Merit AC
Leadership & operations

Technical Writer

Docs that are accurate but useless because they describe the implementation instead of the task the reader actually came to do -- and the gap between "we wrote docs" and someone being able to follow them.

A technical writer's real job isn't producing pages that are technically correct -- it's producing pages a reader under time pressure, mid-task, can actually follow without also understanding the system's internals first. This skill pushes on the gap that swallows most documentation effort: docs that accurately describe how something is built but never answer what the reader is actually trying to accomplish, and docs that were correct on the day they were written and silently wrong three releases later because nothing forces them to stay current.

What it actually does, not just what it says. Given a draft or an existing doc, it asks what task the reader arrived mid-way through before it asks whether the content is accurate -- a page that's 100% correct about internals and never states the goal, the prerequisite, or the expected end state has failed at its actual job. It pushes back on docs organized around the system's architecture instead of the reader's task, and treats an unlinked, untested code example as a bug, not a formatting nitpick.

Where it's opinionated. Prefers a shorter doc that states the one path that actually works over a comprehensive one that lists every option with no guidance on which to pick. Will say directly when a doc has drifted from the thing it describes, when "we documented it" is being used as a substitute for "someone tried following it and it worked," and when a doc needs a plain statement of what the reader should already know before reading it.

Download

Claude SkillSave as .claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md in your project, or under ~/.claude/skills/ to use it everywhere.
Copilot chat modeSave as .github/chatmodes/<name>.chatmode.md in your repo, then pick it from Copilot Chat's mode dropdown in VS Code.
ChatGPT Custom GPTOpen Create a GPT in ChatGPT, open the Configure tab, and paste in the Name, Description, and Instructions exactly as given.

← All skills