Booksmith

What Booksmith does

Booksmith shapes base information such as research, notes, outlines and transcripts into a book manuscript. It plans the book, stops for human approval, then drafts, reviews and assembles. Each phase runs as a visible Kanban task with parent-child links, so you can see what is running, blocked or waiting. The single mandatory human gate sits after planning and before drafting.

Planning produces a Book Bible and per-chapter prompts that name the exact sources each chapter may use. Chapters are drafted one at a time, each self-reviewed and revised once and accompanied by a note on what was read. The full manuscript is then reviewed for pacing, continuity and redundancy, front and back matter is written, and everything is assembled into one file. The skill lives in skills/booksmith/. The author says it is shared for study and adaptation, not as an installable product, and offers no support.

Key features

• Book Bible and per-chapter prompts naming allowed sources
• One mandatory human approval gate between planning and drafting
• Every phase visible as a Kanban task with parent-child links
• Chapter-by-chapter drafting with a source-use note and one self-review
• Manuscript review and assembly into a single file

When to use it

• Studying a Kanban-based design for a long multi-step writing pipeline
• Adapting the source-discipline rules and approval gate to your own writing workflow
• Turning research and notes into a drafted manuscript with human checkpoints

Who it is for: Authors and agent builders who want to study or adapt a Kanban-driven book-writing pipeline.

How it fits with Hermes Agent

The repository is tagged hermes, hermes-skill and kanban, and its core artifact is a skill that runs phases as Kanban tasks. The opening part of the README does not name Hermes in its text.

Note: The author describes it as a personal system shared for study, not an installable product, with no support or setup path.

FAQ