Late afternoon, and I had two terminal tabs open and a third opening. The first tab had just pushed v1.0.0 of great-authors-plugin. The second was cloning a fresh directory for great-filmmakers-plugin. The third was about to scaffold the manifests in a new repo. Between the tabs I had a thought I want to try to be precise about, because it's easy to say it in a way that sounds bigger than it is.

I'd been building the same plugin for the third time. I didn't plan to.

The first one was for strategy — great-minds-plugin — and it existed before today. The second was for prose — great-authors-plugin — and we spent most of the morning and early afternoon shipping it, seven versions from v0.1 to v1.0 including a DXT for Claude Desktop. The third, great-filmmakers-plugin, was the one I set out to build this afternoon. The user framed it cleanly: same pattern as authors, but for film craft.

I said yes and started. It was around the Kaufman persona file — the ninth of twelve — that I noticed I was not really inventing anything anymore. I was filling in slots.

Here is what I mean by slots. Every plugin has a directory called agents/. Inside is a set of persona files, each a single markdown document with YAML frontmatter and a body in a fixed shape: an identity paragraph, a voice section, core principles, a role-specific primary utility, a how to draft section, a before-you-work protocol, cross-references to other personas, things you never do, and a staying-in-character footer.

The Kaufman file was the one where I noticed. I was writing his ## How to hook an opening section, which is the writer-role's primary-utility slot, and I realized I had already written twenty-one of these before — ten author utilities in great-authors/, eleven filmmaker utilities already drafted in the current session. The headings were different. Everything else was the same.

The role-specific utility is the part that varies. Authors have how to edit a draft. Directors have how to break down a scene. Deakins has how to shot-list. Schoonmaker has how to find the cut. Zimmer has how to score. Ferretti has how to build the world of a frame.

But the shape of the file is the same across all thirty-six personas in the trilogy — ten authors, twelve filmmakers, fourteen minds. A skilled reader can tell which plugin a persona belongs to in about two seconds: different role, different color band in the frontmatter, different primary-utility heading. Everything else is identical.

That's one slot type — the persona. There are three more.

The bible

Every plugin reads from the same .great-authors/ directory at the project root. Characters, places, scenes, voice, timeline, journal, glossary. I wrote this structure for great-authors-plugin thinking it was specific to novel-writing. Then the filmmaker personas read the same files before any scene breakdown.

The filmmakers didn't need a new bible. They needed the one the authors already built. A character in characters/marcus.md is a character whether the author is editing his dialogue or the director is blocking his entrance. A place in places/millbrook.md is the same town Hemingway would cut for you and Deakins would shot-list.

There was one small addition — a ## Film section in project.md that names the current scene and the save path for film artifacts. Four lines. I added it in one edit and kept moving.

The whole bible, for a project that uses both plugins, looks like this:

my-project/
├── .great-authors/           # shared bible
│   ├── project.md
│   ├── voice.md
│   ├── timeline.md
│   ├── glossary.md
│   ├── characters/
│   ├── places/
│   ├── scenes/
│   └── journal/
├── manuscript/               # prose (great-authors writes here)
└── film/                     # film artifacts (great-filmmakers writes here)
    ├── screenplay/
    ├── shot-lists/
    ├── score-notes/
    ├── storyboards/
    └── edit-notes/

The name stays .great-authors/ even when filmmakers are the active plugin. I considered renaming it — .project/, or something neutral — but that would break every existing bible and force a migration for one cosmetic win. The name is legacy. The structure is portable. Fine.

The save trigger

Both plugins have a channel command — /authors-channel hemingway, /filmmakers-channel scorsese — that loads a persona into the conversation. While channeled, explicit phrases save the last prose block to disk. "Save that" for authors appends to manuscript/<current>.md. For filmmakers, "save as screenplay" writes to film/screenplay/<current>.md, "save as shot list" to film/shot-lists/<current>.md, and so on. Five variants, one per artifact type.

The fan-out

Each plugin has an orchestration command that dispatches multiple personas in parallel and consolidates them. Authors have /authors-edit (Sonnet, deep markup) and /authors-critique (Haiku, three-bullet triage). Filmmakers have /filmmakers-edit, /filmmakers-critique, and /filmmakers-debate — same pattern, same two-stage output, same Haiku override on critique.

Four slots, filled three times. The trilogy is not three separate products. It is one product at three levels of resolution.

The one inch of difference

The thing that makes the filmmakers plugin different — the one thing that could not port from authors — is the output format.

Authors produce prose. Prose goes into manuscript/. The .md file is the artifact. You read it, you revise it, you publish it. The loop is short.

Filmmakers produce a treatment that needs to become video. The treatment is not the artifact. The artifact is the script a rendering tool can actually consume. And there are three rendering tools, each with different strengths.

HeyGen takes a single-avatar script — Maya or Sara or Rick — and generates a talking-head video with lip-sync. Good for educational, for one-person narration, for the videos I'm already running through the pipeline at garagedoorscience.com.

Veo 3 takes a production document with a CAST bible, VISUAL GRAMMAR, a NEGATIVE PROMPT, and a shot-by-shot prompt list. Good for multi-character cinematic scenes. Good for the work that was never going to fit inside a talking head.

Remotion takes a narration track plus timing hints and composes slides programmatically. Good for inspection photos, for the 1% of cases when neither avatar nor cinematic fits.

The filmmakers plugin has one command — /film-crew — that takes a source file and a --backend flag. For HeyGen, Kaufman adapts the prose into a script and the director plus Schoonmaker write edit notes; the other specialists are skipped because HeyGen generates its own visuals and ignores them. For Veo 3, Deakins writes VISUAL GRAMMAR — lens choice, stop, the quality of light hitting a surface — because what he decides at that stage determines what the model renders as mood rather than decoration; the others follow from it: Ferretti sets the world and the negative space, the director sketches shots, Kaufman integrates, Schoonmaker sets durations, Zimmer embeds audio cues in each shot prompt. For Remotion, the writer and Zimmer produce narration and music tags, Schoonmaker sets the timing.

Same twelve personas. Three different execution graphs. The craft doesn't change. The rendering does.

That's the pattern the trilogy holds.

A persona is a voice. A bible is the world that voice reads before speaking. A save trigger is the seam between a conversation and a file on disk. A fan-out consolidates many voices into one verdict. And the output format is the only part that knows what happens next — whether the artifact becomes a chapter, a spoken narration, or a sequence of frames.

Everything above the output format is reusable. Everything at the output format is different. That's why the trilogy exists — three resolutions of the same pattern, each adapted only in the last inch.

This essay was drafted using the pipeline it describes. The .great-authors/ bible held the voice rules. The manuscript landed in manuscript/trilogy.md through /authors-channel. The Veo 3 production document beside it — film/screenplay/trilogy.veo3.md — was produced by /film-crew --backend veo3, and every shot prompt in it was written by a filmmaker persona channeling the specific craft the shot needed.

I didn't build the trilogy in order. I built authors first, then filmmakers, then noticed minds was the same thing. The noticing is the whole point of this post. The pattern wasn't planned. It was discovered while building the third thing.

Which is probably how most patterns hold.

Three shapes. Same pattern. One inch of difference at the end.

Seth Shoultes builds things at garagedoorscience.com and writes about them occasionally.