The Skill: five questions, one file

1The five questions

That's the whole intake. None of them are about design.

1. Name or handle. Used verbatim. However you write it is how it appears.

2. Niche. This is the only field that changes how the site looks. Kitchen and home, skincare, cycling gear — the answer picks the typeface, the palette, the layout and the structure.

3. One line about what you do. Plain sentence. This becomes the first thing a brand reads. Not a tagline. Module 0B's niche sentence goes here almost unchanged.

4. Your three best pieces. One per line: what it was, then the link. Drafts are fine — put in what you actually have.

5. Your brand voice in three words. The Skill uses these for tone, not decoration.

That's it. Twenty seconds of typing per field, and the last one is the only one people find hard — Module 3 §1's comparison trick works on yourself as well as on a client.

On having less than three pieces

Then the site has less than three. The Skill will not pad it, and this is a constraint written into the file deliberately: never invent work the creator did not list.

Module 4 §3 covers what to show when you have nothing yet, and the answer applies here — spec work, labelled as spec, is a legitimate portfolio piece. What isn't legitimate is a site implying six clients when you've had none.

2What it writes

One file. index.html, everything inside it — all the styling, all the structure. Verified properties, from the Skill's own constraints:

That last row matters more than it looks. A site built in somebody's website builder lives in their account on their terms. This is a file. Nothing can switch it off, put a banner on it, or start charging.

3Reading what it did

Here is where this module differs from every "AI website builder" you've seen, and it is the point.

Before it writes anything, the Skill prints the instruction it compiled from your answers — in full, not summarised. You can read exactly what is about to happen and exactly which parts came from you.

The instruction has three blocks:

READER — verbatim, do not rewrite
  name    [yours]
  niche   [yours]
  bio     [yours]
  voice   [yours]

WORK — titles unchanged
  [your three pieces]

DESIGN DIRECTION — derived from niche only
  [typeface, palette, layout, structure]

CONSTRAINTS
  . never invent work the reader did not list
  . never add testimonials, logos or client names
  . readable at 360px; visible keyboard focus

Read the split. Everything above DESIGN DIRECTION is yours, verbatim. The design block is the only thing the Skill decided, and it decided it from one field.

Why the instruction is printed at all

Module 4's standard is that output gets shown with the prompt that made it, never on its own. A generated file with no visible instruction behind it is exactly the thing this guide told you to distrust — so it would be incoherent for the guide's own tool to hand you one.

Two constraints in that list are worth reading properly. Never invent work the reader did not list and never add testimonials, logos or client names are there because a portfolio builder that pads a thin reel is the fastest way to lose a brand that checks. You should be able to see that they're there.

4Prove the niche is doing something

Run it again with a different niche and the same five answers.

Same name, same bio, same three pieces — and a completely different site: different typeface, different palette, different structure. Not a recolour; a different stylesheet and a different layout.

That's worth doing once, for two reasons. It shows the niche field is real rather than decorative. And it shows you what your own answers look like in three registers, which is occasionally clarifying about which one you actually are.

5Read the Skill

skill/portfolio-builder/SKILL.md. It's short.

You'll recognise the shape from Module 5 §3 — an opening that says why it exists, one bolded rule (the reader supplies what is true about their work, the skill supplies everything about how it looks), a source-of-truth table with a never trust column, an explicit what NOT to do, and a checklist at the end.

Edit it. If you want your links to open in new tabs, or a contact line at the bottom, or your three words displayed differently — that's a line in a text file. You built one of these in Module 5. This is the same object.

6Then get it online

The file is on your computer, which means nobody can see it. Section 2.