protocol

AI Protocol Library

Operational specifications for AI-assisted knowledge work.

This is not a prompt list. These are deployable specs — structured documents you load into an AI session to enforce consistent methodology across repeatable work tasks. Each protocol defines trigger conditions, step-by-step behavior, output format standards, quality gates, and failure modes.


What’s the difference between a protocol and a prompt?

A prompt tells an AI what to do once. A protocol tells an AI how to operate across an entire class of tasks — handling edge cases, ambiguity, format variance, and quality standards without you having to re-specify them each time.

  Prompt Protocol
Scope One request One class of tasks
When it applies You write it Defined trigger conditions
Quality control Your judgment each time Built-in standards and failure modes
Reusable Copy-paste Upload once, invoke anytime
Adapts to context You adapt it Adaptation rules are specified

Protocols

# Name Status Best for
01 Study Guide Builder ✅ Available Learning any field — exam prep, interviews, projects, self-study
02 Japanese AI Interaction Guide ✅ Available Working in Japanese-language AI contexts; register and compression patterns
03 LLM Evaluation Protocol 📋 Planned Measuring and gating LLM quality in production — hallucination, latency, safety
04 AI Discovery Sprint ✅ Available Scoping AI opportunities for an organization — roadmap + PoC spec in under 2 weeks

How to use a protocol

Each protocol is a Markdown file designed to be loaded into an AI session.

In any AI tool (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.):

  1. Open a new conversation
  2. Upload or paste the protocol file as your first message
  3. State your task — the protocol’s trigger conditions handle the rest

What happens: The AI reads the operational spec and executes it — asking the right questions, following the defined steps, applying quality standards, and producing output in the specified format. You don’t need to manage the process.


Protocol 01 — Study Guide Builder

Trigger: Upload the protocol + name a field you want to learn.

What it produces: A personalized study guide — structured as a formatted document or interactive HTML app — built on learning science principles (concept maps, active recall, spaced repetition) rather than generic summarization. Calibrated to your goal (exam, interview, project, curiosity) and your current knowledge level.

Three depth levels:

Full specification


Protocol 02 — Japanese AI Interaction Guide

Trigger: Upload the protocol + start your session in the target language.

What it produces: Expert-register Japanese AI output — natural to a native reader, not translated or rendered from English. Covers register selection, eight compression patterns observed in professional Japanese AI usage, bilingual switching logic, translation and localization guidance, and a four-dimension evaluation rubric.

The core insight: In Japan’s professional AI user community, the highest-competency users do not write polite, formal prompts. They write terse, compressed, command-line-style instructions that assume high context. This protocol documents those patterns — observed across field delivery engineers at a Japan-market AI consulting firm — and makes them reproducible.

Three register levels:

Full specification


Protocols vs. native skills (Cowork, Claude Code, etc.)

Some AI platforms — like Anthropic’s Cowork or Claude Code — support native skills: installed capabilities that live on disk, auto-trigger based on context, and can run code, call tools, and chain multi-step workflows. These are more powerful in their native environment. But they’re also locked to it.

Protocols are the portable alternative.

  Protocol Native Skill
Works in Any AI tool (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) Only the platform it’s installed on
Triggered by You — load it when you need it The system — auto-invoked by the runtime
Context cost Full text loaded per session Read once at invocation, minimal ongoing overhead
Can run code/tools No — instructions only Yes — full tooling access
Portable Yes — one file, works anywhere No — tied to runtime and file system
Inspectable Yes — plain Markdown, human-readable Depends on platform

When to use a protocol over a skill: When you need the behavior to travel with you across tools, when you want the spec to be readable and shareable, or when you’re working in an environment where you can’t install anything. Protocols sacrifice automation for portability — that’s a deliberate tradeoff, not a limitation.


Why protocols, not prompts

Prompts are session-bound. The constraints live in your head, so output quality varies every time — different session, different result, different standard. Protocols make quality reproducible: the spec travels with the task, not the person running it.

Prompts degrade. After a few sessions, you’re re-specifying the same constraints — the same format requirements, the same quality gates, the same instructions not to over-explain the methodology. Protocols encode those decisions once and apply them consistently.

The protocols in this library were developed through direct AI consulting work, tested against real output quality, and refined until the failure modes were explicitly documented and handled. They’re not theory — they’re specs that have been run.


Protocol 04 — AI Discovery Sprint

Trigger: Upload the protocol + paste in your discovery notes (stakeholder interviews, workflow observations, background context).

What it produces: Two deliverables — an AI Opportunity Roadmap (3–5 prioritized use cases with effort/impact framing) and a Priority PoC Spec (scoped, buildable definition of the first thing to build, with explicit success criteria and a go/no-go recommendation). Designed to deliver in under two weeks from a standing start.

Five-phase structure:

Six documented failure modes, each with a built-in prevention step: premature PoC commitment, data availability assumptions, success criteria drift, org readiness blind spot, solutioning before problem definition, and integration complexity underestimation.

Full specification


Project status

This library is actively being built. Protocols 01, 02, and 04 are available. Protocol 03 (LLM Evaluation Protocol — measuring and gating LLM quality in production) is in development.


Built as part of a portfolio of deployable AI tools. See also: GitHub profile.