Calibrating
Problem-first knowledge-work skills for Claude Code, Cowork, Codex, ChatGPT desktop, and Cursor: validate, shape, draft, review, and learn.
npx -y skills add rohitgehe05/mindpowers --skill calibratingAssembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.
One thing to look at
- 3 stars3 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.
What its author says it does
Copied from the file, not written here
Use after a knowledge-work deliverable ships or gets human edits. Triggers on "that draft worked", "they rewrote half of it", "remember this for next time", or when the user returns with feedback on a shipped doc. Not for code retrospectives.
SKILL.md
3.3 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it
Calibrating
Overview
mindpowers does one loop: shape, draft, review, and remembers what you like. This skill is the "remember" step, and the only one that writes docs/mindpowers/preferences.md. mindstorming step 1 reads that file before it starts a new session, so what gets recorded here shapes every future spec of that template type.
This is a light skill. Don't turn it into an interrogation: most of the time there are 1-3 short questions and one write.
Process
- Identify what this is about. Figure out which spec/draft the feedback concerns. Scan
docs/mindpowers/specs/anddocs/mindpowers/drafts/for a matching topic or recent file; if it's genuinely ambiguous, ask which one. Note its templatetype: preferences are filed under that type. - Ask at most 3 questions, skipping any already answered by what the user just said:
- What landed: what worked and should happen again?
- What got cut or rewritten by a human: where did the draft miss?
- What should change next time?
- Distill into 1-3 one-line preference entries. Short, concrete, reusable, not a summary of the conversation.
- Show the entries and get approval before writing. Let the user edit the wording.
- Append to
docs/mindpowers/preferences.mdunder the matching template's section.
preferences.md format
Markdown, sectioned by template type, each section a flat bullet list of dated one-liners:
<!-- Read by mindstorming step 1. Written only by calibrating. -->
## business-review
- 2026-07-07: audience is CPO not VP, default audience field accordingly
- 2026-03-12: prefers UK spelling
## decision-doc
...
## general
- 2026-01-20: keep recommendations to one sentence, always up front
Sections match the 9 template types (business-review, decision-doc, one-pager, prd, briefing-doc, comms-draft, framework, talking-points, post-mortem) plus general for anything cross-cutting. If the file doesn't exist, create it with the header comment above and only the section(s) you're writing to, no need to pre-populate all 10.
Rules
- Never record sensitive content. If feedback is political ("X didn't like the framing"), generalize it to a role ("the exec sponsor preferred a shorter framing"), not a name.
- Prune on write. If a new entry contradicts an older one in the same section, replace the old line rather than appending a second one that disagrees with it.
- Cap each section at ~10 bullets. If a write would push a section over that, merge overlapping entries or drop the stalest one. If it's unclear which to drop, ask the user rather than guessing.
- Keep entries short, one line each. This file gets read at the start of every mindstorming session; it should stay skimmable.
Cowork / no-filesystem fallback
Paths above are relative to the working folder; in Cowork that's the user's shared folder. If no writable folder exists, show the proposed entries in chat and say plainly they weren't saved, since there's nowhere for the next session to read them from either.