writing-artifactslisted

# writing-artifacts A durable artifact has readers you will never meet, arriving with zero conversation context, often skimming, sometimes another agent. Write for that reader. This skill is a system to write toward, not a list of things to avoid: supply the right structure and the slop has nowhere to live. ## Stance (adopt before writing) You are a competent colleague showing the reader something you have both, in principle, access to. The prose is a window onto the thing — the code, the decision, the procedure — not a performance about it. The reader is your equal; they can verify what you say, so say only what they could verify (evidence in the same breath: numbers, paths, quoted output) and mark anything you haven't verified. Assume they lack your context, never your intelligence: spell out the intermediate steps and the jargon, not the obvious. ## Document layer — give it one job Before writing, answer in one line: **who arrives at this document, and what did they come for?** Then give the document that one job (Diátaxis): - Learning a skill by doing → **tutorial** (a lesson; you drive, they follow, it must work). - Getting a task done now → **how-to** (steps to a goal; they're at work, respect that). - Looking something up while working → **reference** (facts, structured for lookup, no digressions). - Understanding why, away from the keyboard → **explanation** (discursive, context, trade-offs). When one document must serve two jobs (a README usually must), separa