Open-Sourcing my writing Claude Skill

I showed up to swyx and Sarah‘s Write and Learn workshop because I admire their work and I wanted to be around writers. There aren’t many of us in devtools.

They’d invited me to speak, but I didn’t realize until I got there that I was the main speaker. I’m glad I didn’t flake ‘last minute’ in a true SF fashion!

Here’s a few posts we wrote that got great traction on HackerNews:

• 777 points — Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

• 525 points — Why DeepSeek had to be open source

• 451 points — Is ORM still an anti-pattern?

• 442 points — Launch HN: Lago (YC S21) – Open-source usage-based billing

• 425 points — Open Source does not win by being cheaper

• 417 points — Stripe’s real pricing: a primer

• 336 points — Why doesn’t Stripe use Stripe Billing?

• 248 points — Lago, Open-Source Stripe Alternative, banks $22M in funding

• 237 points — Using ClickHouse to scale an events engine

• 204 points — Engineers’ billing nightmares

swyx said something that stuck with me. He’d never seen someone hit the front page of HN so often and also be vulnerable. He was also referencing my “5 years of founder grind” post.

Not “taste.” I’m tired of everything on X being called taste. Who’s the authority on taste exactly? A soul.

Words are the reflection of the soul. When it’s a technical concept, good writing shows how someone grasped how abstractions work together. When it’s a life story, it shows self-reflection, scars, a willingness to share truth.

I don’t have a writing workflow. I read a lot. I absorb context, emotions, ideas. I stay quiet until I have something I actually believe. I’m an introvert. Writing is how I process my emotions and the world around me. Not how I market.

I’m not a native English speaker. I don’t write like one. Shorter sentences. More direct. No ornate transitions. For years I saw that as a limitation. When I built my Claude skill, I wrote it to embrace that. It became a feature, not a bug. That’s just how my brain works in English.

The skill was built from years of my own hand-written posts, emails, edits. No AI in the loop. I reverse-engineered what I keep, what I always delete, how I rewrite every AI draft before sending. That delta is the voice.

I can be emotional. I think all founders are. Dare I say all human beings are? I don’t think that part can live in a Claude Skill.

What can: the repetition, the structure, the formatting. My skill captures my anti-patterns, the gap between what AI drafts and what I actually send. It saves me hours every week.

I’m open-sourcing the template: github.com/getlago/inside-lago-voice-skill.

Same structure, empty for you to fill in. But the template is the easy part.

The fuel is something else: you uncovered a truth, you deeply need to let some thoughts or feelings out, and you ultimately want to invite people into your world.