# Pyramid Principle

Barbara Minto's Pyramid Principle as composable writing skills. Short-form, long-form, presentation, and audit with shared source grounding.

Status: active

## Install

```bash
claude plugin marketplace add tyroneross/RossLabs-AI-Toolkit
claude plugin install pyramid-principle@rosslabs-ai-toolkit
```

## The 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 |

## Links

- [HTML project page](https://rosslabs.ai/projects/pyramid-principle/)
- [Source code](https://github.com/tyroneross/pyramid-principle)