write-study-guide

a skill to take a target result in the Stacks project or Kerodon, and write a reading route to it.

a Claude Code skill. name a result you want to reach in a large tag-addressable corpus — the Stacks project, Kerodon — and a reader, and it computes a reading route through the corpus to that result and writes it up as a guide.

where write-topic-guide must carry an exposition because no source does, this corpus already contains excellent exposition with explicit dependencies. so the guide’s value is elsewhere: selection, ordering, motivation, and triage.

four things are particular to it. the reader profile persists — background and a per-corpus frontier, recorded in the corpus’s own coordinates, in a file that outlives any one guide. the spine is computed, not composed: the dependency closure of the targets from the corpus citation graph, pruned by the frontier. the route is edited, never invented. triage is the core editorial act — every stop is marked read closely, skim, or black-box for now, and every black-box is named both in its chapter and in a ledger in part I, with when to return to it. and checkpoints move the frontier: each milestone ends in a checkpoint, and a passed checkpoint is an update written back into the profile.

that last part is the point of the system. a guide that ends without offering the frontier update has not finished.

the shape

phase 0    load or create the profile, reconfirm the frontier
phase A    targets -> route -> milestones -> triage  (you approve the spine)
phase A'   targeted digests of the spine's tags      ->  source-notes/*.md
phase B    author and build                          ->  the guide
close      offer the frontier update

invoke

/write-study-guide route me through the Stacks project to fppf descent
/write-study-guide what should this student read in Kerodon to get to straightening

produces

a guide directory in the house format, plus an updated reader profile.