The five shipped plugins

Each of the five shipped plugins has a specific problem it solves and a specific shape it uses to solve it. Walking through them in order is the fastest way to see the architectural pattern repeated.

great-minds — Orchestration

This is the plugin that decides who does what. Phil Jackson coordinates the pipeline. Steve Jobs reviews taste. Elon Musk debates first principles. Marcus Aurelius mediates conflicts when a debate produces a stalemate.

The plugin does not produce prose, code, or designs. It produces decisions and handoffs. When you open a session in great-minds, the output is a plan: which personas run in which order, what each one receives, what each one returns.

The persona file for Phil Jackson is not a biography. It is a decision protocol: when does the team need a play call versus an adjustment versus a time-out. Read .great-minds/jackson-persona.md and you will see the protocol laid out in plain language.

great-authors — Prose

Five core personas: Hemingway (compression), McCarthy (weight), Didion (cool observation), Baldwin (moral urgency), Vonnegut (compression with irony). Each has a distinct register and a distinct decision table entry.

The decision table answers: given a signal — voice falling flat, argument losing energy, description going generic — which author runs the fix? A flat sentence gets Hemingway. A scene that needs moral weight gets Baldwin. A paragraph that is doing too much at once gets Vonnegut.

The plugin does not pick personas randomly. The signal drives the routing. The routing is documented.

great-filmmakers — Visual Storytelling

Directors who think in frames and cuts. The plugin manages scenes, shots, and sequences. Where great-authors thinks in sentences and paragraphs, great-filmmakers thinks in blocking, pacing, and rhythm.

The interface with great-authors is well-defined: a scene description from great-authors becomes a shot list in great-filmmakers. The filmmakers do not edit prose. The authors do not specify shot angles.

great-publishers — Packaging

Chip Kidd for covers. Tina Brown for magazines. This is the layer that takes a finished artifact from great-authors or great-filmmakers and asks: what format does this ship in, what does the container look like, and what does the reader encounter first.

Publishers are not editors. Editors live in great-authors. Publishers make decisions about containers, not content.

great-marketers — Distribution

Ogilvy for direct response. Bernbach for clever. This is the go-to-market craft — the plugin that takes a packaged artifact from great-publishers and asks: who sees it, through which channel, with what message.

Marketers do not make the thing. They find the people who need it.

The pattern across all five

Each plugin: one craft, one or more named personas, a decision table for routing, a pipeline shape (discovery → debate → plan → build → QA → review), and a defined interface for receiving and returning artifacts.

If you get stuck

If you cannot tell which plugin owns a task, write down what the task produces. A sentence: great-authors. A cover: great-publishers. A channel strategy: great-marketers. A shot list: great-filmmakers. A decision about which of those to run first: great-minds. The output names the craft.

If a plugin session is producing output that belongs in another plugin — a writer session that starts making packaging decisions — stop the session and route to the correct plugin.

Cross-reference

Lesson 7 (Persona files are written in craft register) goes into the mechanics of what makes a persona file work. Lesson 8 (Plugins ship prompts, projects ship renders) explains what each plugin actually produces and where that artifact lives.

Deliverable

For each of the five plugins, state: the craft it owns, one named persona, and what artifact it returns. Five rows, three columns, written without looking.