/journal
Draft a journal entry from a session's work, tuned to the audience you name.
Use this when
A session shipped something worth writing about — a decision, an insight, a debugging arc, a launch. You want a journal draft aimed at a specific audience (private-equity partners, board operators, technical founders, eng managers) without starting from a blank page.
Skip this when
The session was routine work. Journal entries earn their space by showing decisions or insights. A "fixed 3 typos" session is not journal material.
What the skill does
Reads the session's commits, session log, and the current chronicle draft (if one exists). Drafts a journal entry per the audience you name:
/journal # detects audience from context
/journal --audience pe # private-equity partners
/journal --audience board # board-level operators
/journal --audience cptos # chief product/tech officers
/journal --audience founders # technical founders
/journal --audience managers # eng leaders + managersReturns a draft under docs/operator-private/journals/YYYY-MM-DD.md
with an audience-recommendations table at the top.
The audience-recommendations table
Every draft opens with this table:
| Post | Primary audience | Hook strength | Publish priority |
|------|------------------|---------------|------------------|You use it to decide which audience matches, whether the hook is strong enough to publish, and when to ship. Weak-hook drafts stay private. Strong-hook drafts publish to the audience they name.
High-value moments the skill looks for
- Scope kills — a feature the team decided NOT to build, with reasoning
- Architecture choices — a boring-tech pick with the reasons the boring version wins
- Process insights — what broke, what worked, what surprised
- Design pushback — a UX call defended against a PM ask
- Quantified results — N agents, M minutes, K artifacts
Sessions without any of the above rarely produce useful journal material. The skill will still draft one; you may decide it is not worth publishing.
Composes with
/session-logdrafts the session record;/journalreads it/kiss wordsruns on the draft to keep prose plain/journal-exportpublishes the draft to Google Docs or Substack
Where the draft lives
- Local Markdown at
docs/operator-private/journals/YYYY-MM-DD.md - Optionally pushed to Google Docs if
journal_doc_idis set insubstrate.config.md - Never committed to public repos automatically — journals are operator-facing by default
Where next
/kiss— grade-check the draft/session-log— the record/journalreads/session-end— end-of-session wrap-up flow