My single most-repeated piece of advice. Before you pour your work into a Word doc or a slide deck, build the version an AI can read — and build it first. Settle the content in one source file, then let it become every human-facing output you need.
You open Word or PowerPoint and start typing into the shape of the final product. The thinking and the formatting get tangled together — and the content ends up trapped inside that one file, in that one shape.
You settle the content in one plain source file, then generate the Word doc, the deck, and the poster from it. The thinking lives in one place; the formats are disposable. That source file is the twin.
Before you pick a format, have a real working conversation with your AI about the content — what are we actually saying, what did we decide, and why. Then capture that thinking in one plain Markdown file. No fonts, no layout, no slides — just the substance, in a form you and the machine can both read.
Discuss the substance with your AI before you choose any output. Think out loud together.
Mark what's decided so you stop re-litigating it; revisit the open parts until they're right.
Do a final pass to make sure the reasoning holds together before anyone formats a thing.
Here's where this turns into something librarians already understand. At the very top of that Markdown file, add a small block of metadata — called YAML frontmatter (YAML cheerfully stands for “YAML Ain't Markup Language” — yes, the acronym contains itself; the tech world has a sense of humor) — that records the provenance of the content: what it is, its status, its version, when it was decided, who decided it, and why. You're cataloging your own knowledge work.
--- title: Eliminate overdue fines on all materials status: approved version: 3 date_decided: 2026-05-14 decided_by: Library Board of Trustees contributors: - Library Director - Finance Committee - Public Services staff rationale: > Fines fall hardest on low-income patrons and recover under 0.5% of our operating budget. Removing them advances equitable access to the collection. supersedes: 2019 tiered-fine policy --- # Fine-Free Decision ## What we decided Effective July 1, 2026, the library will eliminate overdue fines on all circulating materials. Replacement fees for lost or damaged items remain. ## Why - Equitable access for low-income families - Negligible revenue impact (under 0.5% of budget) - Less staff time on collections; warmer front-desk interactions ## Scope All branches, all circulating collections.
That frontmatter answers the question every organization fumbles a year later: when did we decide this, why, and who was in the room? It's administrative metadata for your own work — a catalog record for a decision. The reasoning and the participants travel with the content, instead of evaporating from memory.
Here's our decision, written up as Markdown. Add YAML frontmatter at the top that records its provenance: title, status, version, date_decided, decided_by, contributors, rationale, and what it supersedes. Then we'll keep this file as our source of truth.
Now the payoff. From that one file, your AI can produce whatever a human needs — each one faithful to the same source, and each one regenerable the moment the source changes.
your AI renders it into
A formal Word document
PowerPoint for stakeholders
A flyer for the branch
A plain internal note
It scales down, too. Not every scrap of work needs full frontmatter. For something quick, simply keeping the Markdown version alongside the finished output is enough — the same habit, in miniature. Build the twin at whatever size the work deserves.
Get in this habit and your work starts to compound. Each answer is usually "build the twin."
The report you made could also be a dashboard, a newsletter, a slide. With a twin, that's a re-render, not a rewrite.
Before you type data by hand, ask where it already lives — a feed, an export, a catalog — and pull it in structured.
If it changes monthly, design for the re-run now. A twin plus a saved prompt turns the update into minutes.
If you take one habit from this whole site, I'd want it to be this one. Years from now the specific tools will have changed, but a source file you own — your content, your reasoning, your provenance, in plain text — will still be usable by whatever comes next. Building the twin first is how I keep today's work from becoming tomorrow's dead end. It costs a few extra minutes of thinking up front; it has paid me back a hundred times over.