Agent Skills · Writing

Position Paper Grill

Definition

This is a downloadable agent skill file, not a workflow to follow yourself — you hand it to an agent (for example, by dropping it into a Claude Skills folder), and the agent does the interviewing. It draws out the content of a position paper from an author through a structured conversation, then assembles that content into the seven-part structure documented on Position Papers.

The author still owns the ideas and the argument. The skill’s job is elicitation and structural completeness — making sure nothing essential gets skipped, not inventing the case for the author.

What it does

The interview runs in a fixed order, anchoring the big picture before drilling into detail:

  1. Overarching vision — present state and desired future state, elicited first since everything else hangs off it.
  2. Sub-goals or components — captured directly if the author already has them in mind; otherwise drawn out through guided probes, without forcing a decomposition that isn’t there yet.
  3. Per-component drill-down — each component walked through the four-part pattern: status, recommendation, discussion, risks and requirements.
  4. Case study — an explicit check for precedent or a comparable situation that would give a skeptical reader confidence the idea isn’t untested.
  5. Executive summary — synthesized afterward by the agent as a compressed restatement of the recommendations, rather than elicited separately from the author.

Once the interview is complete, the skill assembles the full seven-part document and checks it against the same rubric used on the Position Papers page — the executive summary actually matches the full presentation, every component has all four parts, risks aren’t a token line.

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Notes and limitations

  • This skill assumes the author already has an idea worth writing about — it elicits and structures, it doesn’t generate the underlying insight.
  • Sub-goal discovery is deliberately bounded (roughly 3–6 components) so the interview doesn’t spiral indefinitely for an idea that doesn’t naturally decompose further.
  • The case study step is optional by design, matching the Position Papers page’s own treatment of it — the skill asks, but doesn’t force one where none exists.