project-memory

Project Memory

What This Skill Does

Generates a structured context file from a short project brief so that an AI assistant loads your editorial voice, audience, constraints, and quality bar at the start of every session — without you re-explaining the project each time.

When To Use This Skill

• At the start of a new editorial project (magazine, podcast series, documentary, newsletter, YouTube channel) when you want every future AI session to respect the same voice, rules, and standards
• When you have been re-explaining the same constraints — tone, audience, terminology, house rules — at the beginning of each chat session and want to stop
• When a project has multiple contributors or freelancers who all need to work within the same editorial frame, and you want a single reference document the assistant can load
• After a significant editorial pivot (new audience, rebrand, format change) when the old context file no longer reflects how the project works
• When onboarding a new editor, writer, or producer onto a project and you want them to see, in one place, how the project thinks and talks
• When you notice that AI-generated drafts for your project are inconsistent — some match the voice, some do not — and you want to eliminate that variance by giving the assistant a stable reference point

What You Need To Provide

Required:

• A short project brief: what the project is, the format (magazine, podcast, newsletter, documentary series, YouTube channel, etc.), and what it covers
• Who the audience is — even a rough sketch helps ("urban professionals in their 30s who read on the train" is more useful than "general audience")
• The editorial voice and tone you want — either described in your own words or shown by example ("like the tone in this paragraph," or "think of how The Atlantic writes features, but shorter and funnier")

Optional:

• Specific do/don't rules ("never use the word 'content' to describe our journalism," "always capitalise Indigenous," "no listicles")
• Key terminology or a glossary — words the project uses in a specific way, or terms that must always appear in a particular form
• Recurring tasks you use AI for on this project (drafting headlines, editing transcripts, writing show notes, generating image prompts)
• Source and reference preferences (preferred citation format, trusted sources, sources to avoid)
• Quality benchmarks — published pieces, episodes, or issues that represent the standard you are aiming for
• Any legal or ethical constraints (anonymisation rules, embargo policies, advertising/editorial separation requirements)
• Format constraints — word counts, segment lengths, episode durations, or other hard limits the project works within
• Team structure notes — who signs off on what, how many writers contribute, whether the project has a single voice or multiple distinct voices within a shared framework