How to design a workflow - Conference Talk Engine (WIP)

How to design a workflow - Conference Talk Engine (WIP) - update 5/3/2026

Practicing building in public and wanted to share what I've built with help from my other writing brainstorming thread from

@Deacon Wardlow

and

@Siv Darmalingum

@E G

and

@David Trammel

Using some of their ideas I did research on the writers and topics they suggested using Notebook LM. I synthesized that research into digestible artifacts for claude to extract themes and guidelines for developing conference talks. I then described to Claude the workflow I wanted to build, can share that prompt if people are interested. And then I also used the workspace-builder as a model for the scaffolding for the conference-talk-engine and my own workspace as models for schema in the Claude and Context mds.

The output of all of this was a spec document to build the workspace. I incorporated guidelines to use SOLID principles for coding to allow a built workspace to be extended and improved upon over time without having to rebuild the whole workspace, this is because I think it's better to build a prototype fast and then iterate rather than be 100% perfect. You want to spend time to make sure that the spec doesn't produce errors, but some things will only show up with actual use cases.

I then researched existing skills relevant to my use case and came up with 2: conference-talk-builder and giving-presentations.

I asked claude to evaluate my research and the existing skills to see what gaps could be improved in the existing skill. I then asked it to write the spec

After first draft of the spec I ran a reader-test which is a custom skill derived from

@Ari Evergreen

's 6 phase workflow.

A rough breakdown would be: 1) research data inputs and relevant skills, compile any useful context relevant to your workflow; 2) analyze inputs with claude; 3) describe your ideal workflow and any models you want to emulate, make sure to mention you are building a spec first; 4) review plan for spec; 5) draft the spec using claude; 6) reader-test to qa the spec.

that produced the spec below which anyone should be able to run and build this in their own computer with the AI of their choice, the dependencies (skills and research) are in the zip. I'll get this up on github eventually but wanted to share here first.

This is also a WIP so open to feedback and hope to improve this workflow. I'll update this post periodically as the workflow gets updates.

About to put this to the test on a few conferences I'm pitching so will let people know how it goes!

## Update after first run

very happy with the result. Need more data as I already had a good idea for a talk, but I gave it an brain dump of an idea and in 10 minutes I had a brief and an abstract, ready to start outlining. Overall spent 5-6 hours on this workflow, but now I can pump talk ideas out super quick. Ironically my first talk idea is on workflows lol

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