Merge step (c): converge to ce-* convention for agents and skills
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Aligns local custom agents, skills, and modified shared agents with upstream's
flat ce-<name>.agent.md + ce-<skill>/ convention introduced in upstream v3.x.

Changes:
- Delete 9 upstream-renamed agents for locally-dropped agents (design/*, rails
  reviewers, ankane-readme-writer, data-migration-expert, performance-oracle,
  security-sentinel)
- Delete ce-dhh-rails-style skill (local dropped dhh-rails-style entirely)
- Move 5 custom agents to flat ce-<name>.agent.md paths:
  * python-package-readme-writer, design-conformance-reviewer,
    tiangolo-fastapi-reviewer, zip-agent-validator, lint
- Rename 12 custom skill directories with ce- prefix:
  * john-voice, jira-ticket-writer, hugo-blog-publisher, weekly-shipped,
    proof-push, ship-it, story-lens, sync-confluence, excalidraw-png-export,
    python-package-writer, fastapi-style, upstream-merge
- Port local Python/FastAPI edits into upstream's flat ce-best-practices-
  researcher.agent.md and ce-kieran-python-reviewer.agent.md
- Update frontmatter name: fields in all 17 renamed files to match new paths

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
John Lamb
2026-04-24 12:53:31 -05:00
parent a7b15298e0
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# The Saunders Storytelling Framework
A distillation of George Saunders's craft principles for evaluating whether prose constitutes a high-quality story.
---
## The Fundamental Unit: The Beat
Every moment in a story is a beat. Each beat must *cause* the next beat. Saunders calls causality "what melody is to a songwriter" — it's the invisible connective tissue the audience feels as the story's logic.
The test: are beats **causal** or merely **sequential**?
- Sequential (anecdote): "this happened, then this happened"
- Causal (story): "this happened, *therefore* this happened"
If beats are merely sequential, the work reads as anecdote, not story.
---
## What Transforms Anecdote into Story: Escalation
> "Always be escalating. That's all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation. A swath of prose earns its place in the story to the extent that it contributes to our sense that the story is still escalating."
Escalation isn't just raising stakes — it's **irrevocable change**. Once a story has moved forward through some fundamental change in a character's condition, you don't get to enact that change again, and you don't get to stay there elaborating on that state.
**The story is a staircase, not a treadmill.**
---
## The "Is This a Story Yet?" Diagnostic
Stop at any point and ask: *if it ended here, would it be complete?*
Early on, the answer is almost always no — because nothing has changed yet. The story only becomes a story at the moment something changes irreversibly.
**Precise test: change = story. No change = still just setup.**
---
## The "What Do We Know About This Character So Far?" Tool
Take inventory constantly. A reader's understanding of a character is always a running accumulation — and every beat should either **confirm**, **complicate**, or **overturn** that understanding.
The more we know about a person — their hopes, dreams, fears, and failures — the more compassionate we become toward them. This is how the empathy machine operates mechanically: **specificity accrues, and accrued specificity generates care.**
---
## The Three E's
Three words that capture the full framework:
1. **Escalation** — the story must continuously move forward through irrevocable change
2. **Efficiency** — ruthlessly exclude anything extraneous to the story's purposes
3. **Expectation** — what comes next must hit a Goldilocks level: not too obvious, not too absurd
---
## The Moral/Technical Unity
Any story that suffers from what seems like a **moral failing** will, with sufficient analytical attention, be found to be suffering from a **technical failing** — and if that failing is addressed, it will always become a better story.
This means: when a story feels wrong emotionally or ethically, look for the craft problem first. The fix is almost always structural.
---
## Summary: The Diagnostic Questions
Apply these in order to any piece of prose:
1. **Beat causality** — Does each beat cause the next, or are they merely sequential?
2. **Escalation** — Is the story continuously moving up the staircase, or running on a treadmill?
3. **Story-yet test** — If it ended here, would something have irreversibly changed?
4. **Character accumulation** — Is our understanding of the character growing richer with each beat?
5. **Three E's check** — Is it escalating, efficient, and pitched at the right level of expectation?
6. **Moral/technical unity** — If something feels off morally or emotionally, where is the technical failure?