Corpus

An archive of Mike Heroux's CS373 (Senior Research Seminar) teaching material — College of St. Benedict / St. John's University — split into timeless Human Skills and timely, tool-dependent material in two forms — AI-Assisted Workflows (a human follows these with an AI tool's help) and Agent Skills (downloadable files handed to an agent, which does the work directly) — with an About Corpus section explaining the philosophy behind that split.

Status

The site is content-complete. All 8 About Corpus pages, all 16 Human Skills, all 5 AI-Assisted Workflows, and the first Agent Skill are fully written — site structure, navigation, styling, and content are all in place.

About Corpus: Origins, Philosophy, A Tale of Three Students, Knowledge Half-Life, ReVeaL, Dialogue and Community, Self-Assessment, AI as Collaborator.

Human Skills (16): Scoping a Thesis Statement, Captions That Work, Effective Reviews, Position Papers, Titles and Abstracts That Work, Using LaTeX, Predictions That Work, Retrospectives, Effective Mental Models, Discussions That Work, Presentations That Work, Better Technical Writing, Level of Expertise Dialogue, Knowledge Half-Life, Slides That Work, Benchmarking a New Tool.

AI-Assisted Workflows (5): AI-Assisted Reviewing, AI-Assisted Abstract Drafting, Generative AI Tools, AI-Assisted Development Exercise, AI Usage Policy Development Kit.

Agent Skills (1): Position Paper Grill — pairs with Position Papers. Intended to be the first of an ongoing collection; more will be added as they're built.

A few pages (ReVeaL, Dialogue and Community) were written from adjacent/related source material rather than a single dedicated source page, since no single page covered them directly — each notes what it draws from inline. Knowledge Half-Life and Slides That Work / Presentations That Work each exist in two cross-linked forms (About Corpus philosophy vs. Human Skill technique; two closely related but distinct techniques) — see each page for how the split works.

Not yet done: exact hex/font polish pass beyond the current token system (see Design notes below), and no actual bundle exec jekyll build has been run against this exact final content set — worth a full local build + link-check pass before publishing.

Deployment

This site is set up to deploy as a project site at collegeville.github.io/Corpus/, living alongside — not replacing — the org's existing root homepage. _config.yml's baseurl is set to "/Corpus" accordingly. Every internal link in this repo goes through the relative_url filter, so if the deployment target ever changes (e.g. this becomes the org's root site instead), baseurl is the only line that needs to change.

This repo should live at Collegeville/Corpus on GitHub (a separate repo from Collegeville/Collegeville.github.io, which serves the existing root homepage), with GitHub Pages enabled for it.

There's no CNAME file, since there's currently no separate custom domain pointed at this site — add one later if that changes.

Local development

bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve

Then visit http://localhost:4000.

Checking your work

Before committing, or in CI, run the static audit script — it doesn't need Ruby or a Jekyll build, just Python 3 and PyYAML:

python3 scripts/audit.py

It checks front matter validity, slug/URL collisions, that every related_ai_workflow / related_agent_skill / related_human_skill cross-link actually resolves, that every internal link in page bodies is correctly wrapped with relative_url (so it respects baseurl) and points at a real page, and basic Liquid tag balance in layouts/includes. A clean run prints ISSUES: 0.

Structure

_config.yml          site config, nav, collection definitions
_layouts/             default.html (shell), page.html (About Corpus pages),
                       skill.html (Human Skills / AI-Assisted Workflows /
                       Agent Skills pages — all three collections share it)
_includes/             head.html, sidebar.html, footer.html
assets/css/style.scss  design tokens + all site styling
assets/examples/         functional resources a Human Skill page depends on
                          to work (e.g. assets/examples/latex/ — the Using
                          LaTeX worked example), mirrored locally rather than
                          linked out to an external repo so the page keeps
                          working if that repo is later reorganized or removed
assets/agent-skills/     downloadable SKILL.md files, one per Agent Skills
                          entry (e.g. assets/agent-skills/position-paper-grill/)
_about_corpus/          About Corpus section pages (collection)
_human_skills/          Human Skills (collection)
_ai_workflows/           AI-Assisted Workflows (collection)
_agent_skills/           Agent Skills (collection)
about-corpus/index.md    About Corpus landing page
human-skills/index.md    Human Skills landing page (auto-lists the collection)
ai-workflows/index.md    AI-Assisted Workflows landing page (auto-lists the collection)
agent-skills/index.md    Agent Skills landing page (auto-lists the collection)
index.md                 site homepage

Landing pages loop over their collection automatically — adding a new file to _human_skills/, _ai_workflows/, or _agent_skills/ makes it show up in the nav sidebar and on the section's index page with no other edits required.

Adding a Human Skill

Create a new file in _human_skills/, e.g. _human_skills/my-skill.md:

---
title: My Skill Title
category: Writing        # Writing | Presenting | Research | Discussion | etc.
tags: [tag-one, tag-two]
summary: One sentence, shown on the index card and in <meta description>.
source: https://maherou.github.io/Teaching/files/CS373/...   # optional
related_ai_workflow: my-workflow-slug                          # optional, must match
                                                                 # an AI-Assisted Workflow's `slug`
related_agent_skill: my-agent-skill-slug                       # optional, must match
                                                                 # an Agent Skill's `slug`
slug: my-skill                                                 # used for cross-linking
---

Then write the body using these H2 sections, in order (skip any that genuinely don't apply, but don't reorder them):

1. Definition — what the skill is, in plain terms. The opening paragraph gets a manuscript-style drop cap automatically; no markup needed, just make sure the Definition section's first paragraph is the one you want that treatment on.
2. Learning Outcome — what someone should be able to do afterward.
3. Core Structure — the technique itself, broken into steps or parts.
4. Worked Example — a concrete, specific example, not a hypothetical sketch.
5. Common Pitfalls — a short bulleted list of ways this goes wrong.
6. Rubric / Checklist — a scannable list someone can check their own work against.

See _human_skills/scoping-a-thesis-statement.md for a complete example, including how a merged-in secondary framework (the Good Topic Checklist) was folded into Core Structure as a distinct earlier stage rather than force-fit into the main flow.

Adding an AI-Assisted Workflow

Same idea, in _ai_workflows/, with related_human_skill: <slug> instead of related_ai_workflow if it pairs with a Human Skill. These pages should carry a visible "last verified" or "as of" note in the body once they have real content — these are explicitly expected to go stale and need periodic refreshing, unlike Human Skills.

Adding an Agent Skill

Two things go in together: the collection entry and the downloadable file itself.

1. Add the actual skill file at assets/agent-skills/<slug>/SKILL.md. This is the file a person downloads and hands to an agent, so it needs to be fully self-contained — any internal cross-reference to a Human Skill page should be a full https://collegeville.github.io/Corpus/... URL, not a repo-relative path, since the file no longer lives next to the repo once it's downloaded.
2. Add a collection entry in _agent_skills/<slug>.md describing what the skill does and linking the download, with related_human_skill: <slug> if it pairs with one:

---
title: My Agent Skill
category: Writing
tags: [tag-one, tag-two]
summary: One sentence, shown on the index card and in <meta description>.
related_human_skill: my-skill-slug   # optional, must match a Human Skill's `slug`
slug: my-agent-skill                 # used for cross-linking
---

See _agent_skills/position-paper-grill.md and assets/agent-skills/position-paper-grill/SKILL.md for a complete example, including how the human-facing description differs from the skill file itself (the description explains what the skill does and why; the skill file is the actual instructions handed to the agent).

Adding an About Corpus section

Add a file to _about_corpus/, with title, summary, and an order field controlling its position in the sidebar and on the About Corpus index page. Layout and section label are applied automatically via _config.yml defaults — no front matter needed for those.

Design notes

Palette and type are defined as CSS custom properties at the top of assets/css/style.scss — change values there, not throughout the stylesheet. The palette leans on CSB/SJU navy as the primary accent and a muted vellum gold as a secondary accent (used for the "AI-Assisted Workflow" / "Agent Skill" / "Companion skill" cross-link chips), against a warm paper background — a quiet, restrained nod to the Benedictine/manuscript setting rather than a literal one.

Maintainers

Duong Do (@duongdo27), Jim Willenbring (@jwillenbring), Mike Heroux (@maherou).