make-it-runbook

Make it a runbook

You worked something out in the chat: an email setup, a migration, a move. The steps are scattered across twenty messages, some were corrected halfway, and a couple of them have to wait a day. This turns that into one page you can work through: tick as you go, come back tomorrow, and never follow the advice that was later taken back.

In Claude Desktop and claude.ai the skill starts automatically on a matching request, with no slash command. "Make it a runbook" is the natural trigger.

Two references, loaded when a step needs them: distill.md (turning a messy conversation into the final agreed steps: read it every time) · runbook-schema.md (the data the page renders from, and the id rules).

---

The flow

conversation → distill → runbook.json → validate → page. Copy this checklist into your reply and tick it off, because the distillation is where a confident-looking runbook goes wrong:

Runbook progress:
- [ ] 1. Distill: ledger → final agreed steps, execution order, waits, notes, literals
- [ ] 2. Ask only what blocks the shape (≤3 questions, defaults) or flag it on the step
- [ ] 3. Write runbook.json
- [ ] 4. Validate
- [ ] 5. Render and deliver

1. Distill

This is the job; the page is the easy half. Follow distill.md. The rules that matter most:

• Read the whole conversation first, including everything after the plan first looked done. Corrections come late.
• The last agreed word wins. A correction replaces, it doesn't add: when advice went from X to Y, only Y is in the runbook. A changed value is changed everywhere.
• Execution order, not conversation order. Every step comes after what it depends on.
• A forced wait goes right after the step that starts its clock, blocking the first step it holds up, and says what to do meanwhile.
• Warnings and decisions are notes, not checkboxes. Tangents are dropped.
• Literal values are copied exactly, character for character, into values. Never paraphrased, completed or invented.
• Reorganise, don't re-advise. Nothing goes in that the conversation didn't agree. A real problem you spot is raised once, in the closing lines.