Pyramid Principle
Barbara Minto's Pyramid Principle as composable writing skills. Short-form, long-form, presentation, and audit with shared source grounding.
Install
claude plugin marketplace add tyroneross/RossLabs-AI-Toolkit
claude plugin install pyramid-principle@rosslabs-ai-toolkitThe Problem
“Structure this” is a blunt instrument. LLMs drift into five-paragraph essays, bury the lede, and confuse inductive with deductive logic. Every writing request reinvents the rubric, and the cite-Barbara-Minto prompt sits in someone’s scratchpad instead of on disk.
What I Built
Five Minto Pyramid skills you can call from any writing workflow. Generate (draft, outline, structure) or evaluate (audit, critique), with a shared rule library and verbatim source citations.
Impact
docs/source-anchors.md holds verbatim quotes from Minto’s 2009 revised edition with exact page citations and stable anchor IDs (minto-p22-scqa). Skills cite anchors instead of embedding quotes, so every structural claim traces to a page number instead of paraphrased memory.
How It Works
Canonical rules (SCQA, MECE, deduction vs induction, vertical and horizontal logic) live once in pyramid-principle-core/references/. Four sibling skills cross-reference that core through a stable path, so updating a rule updates every caller. External agents address each skill by ID.
| Skill | Use for |
|---|---|
pyramid-principle-core | Rule library, cited by siblings |
pyramid-short-form | Emails, memos, exec summaries, BLUF notes |
pyramid-long-form | Reports, briefs, research writeups |
pyramid-presentation | Deck storylines, slide headlines, data stories |
pyramid-audit | Diagnostic critique of existing writing |