benjaroy/riff
19 stars · Last commit 2026-04-09
Nine opinionated skills for writing personal essays with Claude
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# Riff: A Claude Plugin for Writing Personal Essays **What is this?** This plugin is a toolkit to help people with the process of writing personal essays in collaboration with Claude. There are nine skills that are part of it: Sort, Sequence, Compose, Critique, Revise, Copyedit, Title, Checkpoint, and Riff. Together, they contain almost everything I know about writing in general, framed specifically to make writing with an LLM more intuitive through different steps. Each skill works on its own, though seven of the nine skills are also designed to work together in a chain. **Why does this exist?** The idea behind this plugin is pretty simple. I wanted to distill the ways I've found LLMs helpful in my personal writing process over the years, and formalize those flows into a set of skills for myself, then open-source everything for other people to use. **What do the skills actually do?** ### /sort This skill takes unstructured material like notes, bullet points, or voice memos and distills that into a set of core points. It assesses the type of material you're working with, consolidates overlapping ideas, and preserves your original language and phrasing. Anything that doesn't fit the main structure goes into a "junk drawer" so nothing gets dropped. When it's done, it'll nudge you toward /sequence if you want to explore how those points might evolve into an essay, or it will suggest that you take time to think about the sorted points first if the underlying material is complex. ### /sequence This skill takes sorted points and helps you figure out how to arrange them into an essay. Before proposing structures, it asks what's driving you to write i.e. whether you want to make an argument, tell a story, explain something, or aren't sure yet. If it detects a genuine structural tension in the material (like competing throughlines), it'll ask a follow up to help you choose a direction. Then it proposes one to three structural options depending on what the material supports. When you've picked a direction, it points you toward /compose.