stephens-blog-postlisted

# Writing a stephens.page blog post This skill encodes how posts are built for **stephens.page/blog**. Every canonical post must sound like Jacob Stephens, even when research, figures, or technical editing are collaborative. Hand-written personal essays and fiction live at jacobstephens.net and are out of scope here. **Source tree:** GitHub [`JacobStephens2/stephens.page`](https://github.com/JacobStephens2/stephens.page). On the production host the same tree is often checked out at `/var/www/stephens.page`. Prefer repo-relative paths (`blog/<slug>/...`) when working from a local clone. The reference post this skill was distilled from is live at [The Diagram Is Not the Model](https://stephens.page/blog/the-diagram-is-not-the-model/) (`blog/the-diagram-is-not-the-model/` in the repo). When in doubt, open it and copy its structure. ## The shape of the work, in order 1. **Read the source material first.** Posts start from Jacob's own artifacts: model-council notes, talk notes, profiling reports, commit history, an ADR, a working design doc - whatever he points you at. Read all of it before writing a line. The post's job is to *teach* what those notes contain, not to summarize them. 2. **Find the thesis.** State the single load-bearing idea in sentence one (see Voice). Everything else is scaffolding for it. 3. **Pick the teaching techniques.** Education concepts applied deliberately (from notes on Geoffrey Litt's "Understanding: the New Bottleneck"): intuition