Shipping the Tools, Not Just the Ideas
Up to now, subscribers and LinkedIn readers have gotten the same content at the same time. That worked, but after almost every piece I’d hear the same thing from a few of you: “Great — but how do I actually do that?”
So starting next week:
Subscribers get the tools, not just the ideas. Alongside each piece of content, I’ll share markdown files you can take and run with — skills, scripts, and prompts that plug directly into the tools you’re already using. You’ll access them through the Substack community functionality.
LinkedIn posts release a week later. Ongoing threads and discussion will keep happening there, but the tools and the first read stay here on Substack.
What this would have looked like already
To make it concrete, here are three recent pieces where the tools would have changed the experience.
The Second Brain, Part One walked through building a Postgres + MCP memory system that any AI can read from and write to — one brain, every tool, memory that never starts from zero. What you would have gotten: a Supabase schema, the MCP server config, and the capture prompts I use daily. Instead of “this sounds useful,” you’d have a starter kit up and running in an afternoon.
Spec-Driven Development laid out a three-layer hierarchy — PRD, design spec, feature specs — for getting useful output from AI instead of constant course-correction. What you would have gotten: all three templates, ready to fill in. The piece explained why it works. The templates would have let you start using it the same day.
The Synthetic Persona Protocol described how to build AI stand-ins that will pressure-test your ideas instead of telling you they’re great. What you would have gotten: the persona template, the prompt scaffolding, and the conversation flow — the whole protocol as files you could actually run.
In each case, the gap between reading and using was bigger than it needed to be. That’s what I’m closing. BTW, I will come back to these examples for sure.
What’s next
First drop next week: the skills I use for with OpenBrain. Not the “read my emails and write a draft” version — the larger context layer that actually makes the output worth reading. That will be episode two in the Open Brain series.
The reason for the change is simple: I want to shrink the gap between “I enjoyed that” and “I used that.” Substack’s tools make that easy, so we’re going to use them.
More soon.
—Dave