Expert Lab

Turn long technical documents into guided AI conversations, so you stay engaged and stop losing important details.

A curated collection of personas and reusable skills for document-centered AI work. IDE-agnostic - works with Cursor, VS Code, or any agent that reads Markdown instructions.

Quick Start (30 seconds)

1. Put a document in your workspace (for example, Project-Plan-v3.docx).
2. Reference it in chat:

@Project-Plan-v3.docx

3. The agent reads AGENTS.md, selects a persona from personas/personas-map.md, activates the right conversion skill, and starts the review flow.
4. Continue naturally with prompts like next, go deeper, skip to risks, or summarize this section.

What makes this different

• Document-first workflow instead of one-shot summaries.
• Persona routing for the right review lens (understand, verify, critique, refine).
• Skill-based file conversion so docs become clean Markdown for better reasoning.
• Works with plain Markdown instructions - no build step and no platform lock-in.

Document Review Mode

When you reference a document without extra instructions, the agent enters review mode:

1. Divide the document into logical, self-contained parts.
2. Present the first part with a clear summary.
3. Wait for your signal (next, move on, continue).
4. Present the next part and repeat.
5. Offer a short recap at the end.

This keeps context across interruptions and makes long documents easier to review.

Persona flow

Start with the default persona, then move to specialized personas when needed.

Persona	Role	Command
Tech Doc Assistant	Default: understand complex documents in progressive depth	Upload or reference a document
Due Diligence Expert	Verify claims, evidence, and decision risk in documents	/dd
Communication Expert	Refine clarity and audience fit for document or message content	/pr, /pr-int, /pr-us, /pr-india, /pr-ee
MELT Expert	Domain-specific review for telemetry and observability documents	/melt
Agentic Observability	Critique architecture documents for dual-agent observability design	/o11y
Engineering Leader	Decision critic and engineering management sparring partner	Auto-routed by topic; /11 for 1:1 prep

Default persona when no match is found: tech-doc-assistant. Use /none to skip persona selection entirely.

Engineering Leader — why this persona matters

Most management mistakes are not made because the manager is incompetent. They are made because the manager acted too fast — on incomplete data, without input from the team, or with communication that landed wrong.

The Engineering Leader persona exists to slow you down at the right moment:

• Decision critic — challenge your plan before you commit. It asks what data you have, whether you talked to the people affected, whether you are solving the real problem or a symptom, and whose problem this actually is.
• Communication up vs. down — framing a message to your VP and announcing a change to your team are fundamentally different tasks. This persona knows the difference and will call out when your framing is wrong for the audience.
• 1:1 and feedback prep (/11) — turns raw observations into structured agendas and SBI+I feedback drafts, so you walk into the conversation prepared.
• Survey design — when you say "the team doesn't trust X," it will ask: how do you know? Then help you build a short anonymous survey to get real data before you act on assumptions.
• Operational awareness — recognizes that incidents, bugfixes, telemetry changes, and resource optimization often cluster around on-call duty, not scattered focus. Prevents you from misreading a team member's work.

It is blunt, data-driven, and will not agree with you to be polite. That is the point.

Special persona: Prompt Builder Expert

Persona	Role	Command
Prompt Builder Expert	Create and improve prompts and persona definitions for new domains or goals	/builder

This persona helps the framework evolve by generating new high-quality personas and prompt patterns.

Skills

Skills are persona-agnostic and can be combined with any persona.

Skill	Description
Confluence DOC to Markdown	Convert Confluence-exported .doc (MIME/HTML) to Markdown
DOCX to Markdown	Convert Word documents to structured Markdown
PDF to Markdown	Convert PDF to Markdown (text-first, OCR fallback)
Screenshot to Markdown	Extract text from screenshots via OCR
Markdown to PDF	Export Markdown to PDF with Mermaid and LaTeX support
Markdown to DOCX	Convert Markdown back to Word format
Mermaid Diagrams	Create architecture, flow, and sequence diagrams
1:1 Planning	Prepare structured 1:1 agendas and draft actionable feedback (/11)
Survey Builder	Build situation-specific feedback surveys (360, pulse, trust diagnostics)

Repository structure

personas/               # how the assistant thinks and responds
skills/                 # how the assistant executes specific tasks
AGENTS.md               # execution rules: persona + skill selection

Installing skills

Agent runtimes discover skills from ~/.codex/skills/. To make the repo skills available, either symlink or copy them.

Option A: Symlink (edits in repo are picked up automatically)

mkdir -p ~/.codex/skills
for skill in confluence-doc-to-md docx-to-md md-to-docx md-to-pdf mermaid-diagrams one-on-one pdf-to-md screenshot-to-md survey-builder; do
  ln -sfn "$(pwd)/skills/${skill}" ~/.codex/skills/${skill}
done

Option B: Copy (independent snapshot)

mkdir -p ~/.codex/skills
for skill in confluence-doc-to-md docx-to-md md-to-docx md-to-pdf mermaid-diagrams one-on-one pdf-to-md screenshot-to-md survey-builder; do
  cp -R "skills/${skill}" ~/.codex/skills/
done

After installing, restart Cursor (or start a new agent session) so the skill list is reloaded.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.