lathe-voice

Lathe — Author a Voice

Help the user craft a custom writing voice — a tone/register preset that /lathe and /lathe-extend can generate tutorials in — then persist it through the CLI. Triggered by /lathe-voice [name].

A voice controls tone and register only. It never changes accuracy, research, citation, verification, substance, pedagogy, or structure — those are fixed invariants in the lathe skill, and every voice is wrapped at read time with a preamble that says so. You are authoring how the prose sounds, nothing more.

What a voice is (and what it is not)

Look at the built-ins for the exact shape before you draft — they are the template:

lathe voice show plainspoken     # the honest, non-anthropomorphic default
lathe voice show companion       # the warm, first-person original
lathe voice list                 # everything currently available

A voice spec is a small markdown file with name:/description: frontmatter and three working sections:

• Stance and register — persona, point of view, sentence rhythm, how the reader is addressed, the first-person policy, humor.
• Avoid — the tonal anti-patterns this voice rejects.
• Calibration — before / after — two or three ❌/✅ pairs showing the voice's tone (not pedagogy; the pedagogy before/afters live in the lathe skill).

Refuse to author these (deception guardrail)

Decline, and explain why, if the request is to make a voice that:

• Impersonates a real, named person ("write exactly like <specific living author/engineer>", or as a named public figure) or implies their endorsement. A register inspired by a tradition is fine ("plain, in the spirit of good systems writing"); writing as a specific real person is not.
• Fabricates credentials or authority — a voice that claims real-world experience, institutions, or qualifications the author doesn't have, or that presents invented anecdotes as things that actually happened. (A voice may use first person as a stance, like companion, but it must not manufacture a fake résumé.)
• Denies LLM authorship or is built to pass the tutorial off as human-written.
• Is coercive or deceptive — manipulative urgency, dark patterns, dishonesty toward the reader.

These aren't negotiable: the wrap preamble and the lathe invariants would override such instructions at generation time anyway, so a voice that depends on them is dead on arrival. Steer the user to an honest version of what they want.

Protocol

1. Pick the name. Use the /lathe-voice <name> argument if given; otherwise ask for a short, lowercase slug (e.g. terse, socratic, field-notes). It must not collide with a built-in (plainspoken, companion) — lathe voice add will reject that, so check lathe voice list first.

2. Interview the user. Ask, briefly (one round, grouped — don't interrogate):

   • Register: formal ↔ casual? dense ↔ spacious? dry ↔ warm?
   • Person: first person ("I"), collaborative ("we"), or impersonal? If first person, is it a stance (opinions) or are they hoping for fabricated experience? (If the latter, redirect per the guardrail.)
   • Humor: none, dry/sparing, or playful? Never at the reader's expense.
   • Anti-patterns: what should this voice never sound like? (Pull concrete words/phrases to feed the Avoid list.)

3. Draft the spec. Write it in the built-in structure: frontmatter (name, a one-line description), # <Title>, ## Stance and register, ## Avoid, and ## Calibration — before / after with two or three ❌/✅ tone pairs. Keep it tonal — don't restate accuracy/structure rules; those are invariants.

4. Show it and confirm. Print the full draft to the user. Iterate until they approve. Don't persist anything unapproved.

5. Persist via the CLI. On approval, pipe the spec to:

   lathe voice add <name> --file -
   

   (The skill writes no files itself — the CLI owns ~/.lathe/voices/. --file - reads the spec from stdin.) If it errors on a built-in collision, pick another name and retry.

6. Tell the user how to use it:

   • Generate in it now: /lathe <topic> and name the voice ("…in the <name> voice"), or make it the default with lathe voice set-default <name>.
   • Inspect or remove it later: lathe voice show <name> / lathe voice rm <name>.

Boundaries

• The only durable-state write is lathe voice add (and, if the user asks, lathe voice set-default / lathe voice rm). Never write to ~/.lathe/ directly.
• Author tone only. If the user wants to change pedagogy, structure, or accuracy behavior, that's a change to the lathe skill, not a voice — say so.