Free: the weekly brief template we use for every specialist

A specialist agent is only as good as the brief it reads. The brief is the contract between the human strategist and the drafter. After a year of iterations, this is the schema we converged on. Six fields. Copy it into your own pipeline.

The six fields

Pillar. Which content theme this post belongs to (e.g. P1 product, P2 industry, P3 builder, P4 ops, P5 resource, P6 community). Drives image template, destination URL, and how aggressively the editor scores it. Pillar is routing metadata. It never appears in the copy.

Voice. One of: operator, contrarian, builder, founder, teacher. Each voice has a different register and rhetorical posture. Pin the voice in the brief so the same brand reads the same way regardless of which agent or human drafted the post.

Hook angle. One sentence naming the lens. Not the headline. The angle is the strategic frame; the headline emerges from drafting against it. "Why hourly billing breaks under AI" is an angle. "10 reasons hourly billing is dead" is a headline.

Key points. Two to four bullets, each with a number, a name, or a mechanism. The drafter expands them into prose. The strategist's job is to make the bullets specific. Generic bullets produce generic copy. This is the highest-leverage field.

CTA. The next-step action you want a reader to take. Read more, book a call, download something, follow. This determines the closing line and the URL.

References. Optional but recommended. URLs to whatever informed the angle: an article you read, a post you are responding to, a paper. The drafter cites or paraphrases. References also help dedup so two posts from the same source do not collide.

What is not in the brief

Word count. Tone modifiers ("punchy," "punchier," "make it pop"). Audience persona paragraphs. Anything more verbose than the post you are trying to produce. If the brief takes more than 90 seconds to write, the shape is wrong.

Why six fields

Fewer than six and the agent does not have enough to ground in. More than six and the brief stops being writable in the available time. Six is the equilibrium for repeated weekly content with a consistent voice.

Every layer of the system reads the same six fields. The drafter writes against them. The voice scanner audits compliance with them. The publisher refuses outputs that drift from them. Consistency is what lets a specialist agent ship 40-100 drafts a week without supervision.

How to adopt it

Copy the schema into your existing pipeline. Test on one specialist first; LinkedIn and X are the easiest to baseline. Run for two weeks. Iterate the bullets, not the schema. The schema is the boring part. The leverage is in being specific about what you actually want each post to do.