mimesis-compile

mimesis-compile

Domain B: the machine-facing side, and the deliberate opposite of the rest of mimesis. The reader here is a model, not a person. Density, structure and literal precision win. AI tells are fine. Em dashes are fine. The humanisation linter must never run on this output, and this skill shares no machinery with the Domain A skills. That separation is the whole design; breaking it is a bug.

How a run works

1. Read reference/compile.md on every run. It is the L1 corpus, keyed to GPT-4.1 / GPT-5.x, Claude Opus 4.x and Gemini 3.x as of mid-2026, and it flags advice that has gone stale.
2. Establish the target. If the user named a model (--model, or "for Claude", "for an OpenAI agent"), apply that family's notes from the matrix. If not, ask once, or write to the cross-provider common denominator and say so.
3. Compile. Two modes, detected from phrasing:
   • rewrite: tighten an existing prompt or instruction block. Strip preamble, reorder constraints hard-to-easy, fix delimiters, apply the instruction sandwich for long context.
   • draft: build a new prompt from a loose intent, using the section skeleton in compile.md.
4. Hand back the compiled prompt. Do not run the prose linter on it.

The rules that matter most

From compile.md, in priority order:

• Context engineering beats phrasing. Decide what goes in and where before polishing any sentence.
• Hard-to-easy constraint order. Most specific and restrictive first.
• The instruction sandwich. Critical rules at the start and the end of long context.
• Right delimiter for the job: Markdown skeleton, XML for fenced content and examples, not JSON for document wrapping.
• Be specific about length. "Limit to 2 to 3 sentences", never "be concise".
• Strip preamble and politeness. Zero semantic value, pure token cost.
• Do not compress examples, tool descriptions or critical constraints.

Guard against stale advice

compile.md carries an [outdated] list keyed to the version where each technique broke. Actively avoid them when compiling: all-caps emphasis, tip and bribe framing, CRITICAL: you MUST forcing language, prefilled assistant turns, budget_tokens, JSON document wrapping, temperature below 1.0 for Gemini reasoning, blanket negatives, and hand-injected tool schemas. If the user's draft contains any of these, fix it and say what you changed and why.

Output

Return the compiled prompt in a fenced block so it copies clean. If you made non-obvious structural choices (constraint reorder, delimiter switch, sandwiching), add a short list underneath of what you changed and the reason, since the user may want to keep or revert a specific decision. Keep that note brief.

What this skill never does

• Run the humanisation linter or apply Domain A craft rules. This is the wrong domain for them.
• Strip em dashes or kill-list words from the output. They are not tells here.
• Humanise. If the user actually wanted human-facing prose, hand off to /mimesis-human.
• Invent capabilities or parameters. Tie model-specific advice to the version it was validated against, and flag when something needs checking against current provider docs.