writing:no-diary

No Diary

Arguments

$ARGUMENTS is freeform. Resolve it to concrete text:

• A path, optionally with a line range, reads that file.
• A PR or MR number or URL reads the body with the commands in references/surfaces.md.
• A section name or heading locates it in the artifact under discussion.
• A description with no target names the problem in the deliverable in play.
• A fraction or a keep-list (50%, keep: the warning and the upstream link) sets the target length. Cut to it, taking the Removals in order, and say what went beyond the diary.

With no arguments, resolve the target in this order: text the user pasted this turn, the file this session last wrote or edited, then the PR for the current branch. Ask only when two candidates are equally live.

Output

• A file. Edit it in place.
• A PR or MR body. Write the new body under tmp/, then apply it with the command in references/surfaces.md. Confirm first when the user did not name the PR.
• Pasted text. Return the rewrite in your reply and leave the disk untouched.

Then report what you cut, grouped by the Removals headings, in a few lines.

The Test

Every sentence changes what the reader does. A sentence explaining why a decision was right, what it replaced, or where it came from fails.

Delete whole sentences. Cut within a sentence only for the cases in Gotchas.

Judge the text as a reader who was not in the session. For a whole artifact rather than a passage, dispatch a general-purpose agent that loads writing:no-diary and writing:writing and works from the artifact alone, plus its diff where one exists, with no session transcript.

The rewrite is done when every sentence passes the test and every fact a reader needs from the original survives.

Removals

• Change evolution. The shapes the work passed through. Any sentence needing an earlier draft to parse, and sequencing words such as "originally", "initially", "then", "turned out", "along the way", "ended up".
• Session leakage. The conversation inside the artifact: feedback echoed as commentary, a reviewer's question answered in a code comment, the user's own phrasing quoted back.
• Past states. What the code or doc used to be, and how bad it was. Remove the thing rather than commenting on its removal.
• Provenance and deliberation. Where an idea came from, what it beat, why a rule is correct. Alternatives belong in the commit or the PR body, so when the artifact is a PR body, keep a decision's reason in one clause.
• Restatement. Prose that re-describes the diff: file inventories, structural tours, a paragraph per function. Name the function instead.
• Self-reference. The artifact describing itself, its own sections, or harness behavior the harness already provides.