dharma-writer
A 4-skill content pipeline turning 876 hours of dharma teachings into publishable articles and book manuscripts.
Problem
A brilliant teacher has spent decades giving teachings — hundreds of recorded talks, transcribed automatically by YouTube with all the errors that implies. The transcripts are a goldmine of insight, but nearly unusable in raw form: misspelled Tibetan terms, broken grammar, no structure. Off-the-shelf AI writing tools produce generic prose that sounds nothing like the teacher.
Solution
dharma-writer is the minimalist counterpoint in this portfolio. Where other projects use databases, dashboards, and orchestration layers, dharma-writer has none of it. Four Claude Code skills operate on flat files — that’s the entire system. One skill pulls transcripts. One builds a Buddhist terminology index. One fixes transcription errors. One writes in the teacher’s voice using a 538-line voice profile.
Impact
Two weeks to build. Several finished articles produced, ready for publication. The voice profile approach is portable to any author with a body of existing work. And the deeper lesson — that not building infrastructure is itself an architectural skill — is the one I keep coming back to.
How it works
The contrarian premise.Most engineers can’t resist over-architecting. Faced with 876 raw teaching transcripts, the instinct is to build a content management system. A database. A workflow engine. A UI. Six months later, the database is still empty.
dharma-writer asks the inverse question: what’s the smallest possible system that does the work? Markdown files in a directory structure. Four skills, each with a single job, each operating on flat files. The “infrastructure” is a folder of markdown.
The voice profile
The hun-lye-writingskill loads a 538-line voice profile (v3.0) that captures Dr. Hun Lye’s writing style — sentence cadence, vocabulary preferences, doctrinal framing, characteristic phrases, opening and closing patterns. The profile was built incrementally by analyzing nine published articles, then enriched with patterns from his Substack writing.
The skill takes a topic and an output type (article, book outline, or chapter), runs a research-writing agent that produces a brief, waits for explicit approval, then executes the writing agent. Two human gates. One voice profile. No orchestration framework. The whole system fits in your head.
The voice profile pattern is portable. Any author with a body of existing work can be modeled this way — the skill is the framework, the profile is the customization.
dharma-writer-skills.zip
4 skills + voice profile template. Adapt the voice profile to capture any author's writing style.
Includes: youtube-extract, keyword-index, transcript-improve, hun-lye-writing (template)
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