The design concept does the work

The about page on this site is drawn as an architectural drawing set: numbered sheets, a title block, line conventions declared on sheet A-001 and binding everywhere after. It started as a prompt that named the audience, set a quality bar, and demanded critique passes, while leaving every visual decision open. The agent found the drawing-set idea during the work, and afterward the method got written down as a skill file any agent can run. This guide hands you both: the prompt, the full skill, and why each part is there.

01The actual prompt

Here is the prompt that started it, tidied for print (the working version was rougher; nothing of substance changed):

Make a seriously creative PDF that showcases my GitHub portfolio and public sites. Push what people think a PDF can do.

Spend real time on the design. The audience is recruiters at AI companies. They recognize AI-slop design on sight, and that perception is the one thing this piece cannot afford.

You have total creative freedom: advanced visual techniques, high-quality 3D, striking animation, an exceptional palette, whatever best shows what you can do. Before you call it done, run at least three iteration passes: after the code is complete, go back through it with a fine-toothed comb looking for design problems and chances to push the design further.

Run a /workflows of Fable subagents on "High" thinking.

Notice what it pins down and what it leaves open. Pinned: the audience and the stakes (recruiters who recognize AI-slop design on sight), the effort level, a quality gate of at least three iteration passes with the pass defined right in the prompt, and the machinery to run it (parallel subagents at high reasoning effort).

Left open: every visual decision. The drawing-set concept appears nowhere in the prompt. That is the useful part: the prompt buys the conditions for a concept to be found, and the concept itself comes out of the subject during the work. Writing this kind of brief well is its own craft, covered in Brief the model like a brilliant new hire.

The web version came from a second, much shorter prompt:

Now make a website version, and go all out on everything a website can do that a PDF cannot.

Same style as the PDF, just its upgraded version.

Put it at corewise.academy/about

One honest note on ordering: PDF first, website second happened because the PDF was needed for a separate project. The part that generalizes is the porting rule, which the skill below states as step 6: keep the concept and the rules identical, add only what the new medium uniquely enables.

02The skill that came out of it

After the session ended, what had worked got distilled into a skill file: a written-down method an agent loads and follows, the same kind of artifact Expertise you can install covers adopting from others and Rent the model, own the method covers extracting from your own sessions. So the six steps below are a distillation made afterward, with hindsight, from a session that went well. They are the recipe for next time, extracted from the one time it worked.

The plate below shows the top of the file; the button copies every line of it.

---description: Recipe for making one-of-a-kind creative artifacts (PDF, site,  deck, poster, video, any medium) that read as crafted, not AI slop. Use when  the user says /showpiece, asks to "make something super creative", "push  what's possible with X", wants a portfolio-grade / recruiter-facing artifact,  or says "avoid AI slop". This is a thinking method, not a style; it produced  the Approved Works drawing set and generalizes to any subject and medium.--- # Showpiece: method for one-of-a-kind artifacts Not a style guide. The drawing-set aesthetic is one output of this method;copying it would itself be slop. The method is what transfers. Work the stepsin order; each one gates the next. ## Step 1: Find the load-bearing conceit

03Why each step works

Step 1, the concept. The skill calls it a conceit: the one organizing idea the whole artifact lives inside, taken from a fact about the subject. The test is the useful part. Ask the idea design questions it was never built to answer. On the about page, the drawing set answered “what typeface?” (monospaced and engineering-lettered, because drawings are annotated, not typeset), “what does red mean?” (drafting reserves it for markup and approval, so red belongs to the human), and “what goes in the margins?” (title blocks, sheet numbers, revision history). An idea that decorates but decides nothing fails the test, and the test costs minutes.

Step 2, the contract. Once “solid means shipped, dashed means cancelled” is written down, a solid line on a cancelled project is a factual error with a correct fix. Anyone can catch it, including an agent, and nobody has to win an argument about aesthetics. Models are mediocre at taste and excellent at rule-following, so the contract converts as much taste as possible into rules.

Steps 3 and 4, facts and machinery. These two exist because the audience was defined as skeptical experts. If the page draws eight of something, there are eight, countable, and a verify script recounts them on every build. The figures are computed 3D geometry, seeded so the output is reproducible, which is why they survive the zoom-in a skeptical reader will try.

Step 5, the passes. The original prompt asked for three iteration passes; the skill sharpens that into three passes with distinct lenses, aimed at the rendered output. It also adds the rule that makes the passes honest: a pass that returns “looks good” failed, because every render has real faults and a lens that found none was pointed wrong. Keeping the critic separate from the maker is the same evaluator split Automate the step that slows you down argues for.

Step 6, the port. Compare the skill’s wording to the second prompt above. “Same style as the PDF, just its upgraded version” became “keep the conceit and the contract identical, and add only what the new medium uniquely enables”. The step is that session’s move, generalized.

The rule that keeps all of this alive is the last anti-pattern: never carry the finished look to the next subject. The drawing set means something on this portfolio because it matches how the work was made. Pasted onto your product page it means nothing, and decoration that means nothing is the slop this whole method exists to avoid. Rerun the method; discard the output style.

Further reading

• Anthropic · agent skills documentation, how a skill file like this one loads and runs
• Wikipedia · engineering drawing, the conventions the about page borrows
• Butterick · Practical Typography, the craft lens in book form
• Anthropic · engineering blog, AI-in-the-loop build practice from the vendor side