Recipe

Recipe: Engineering culture document writer

Generate a crisp, authentic engineering culture doc from raw values and team signals.

1

Dump raw values

Paste bullet points, Slack threads, or interview notes. No filter needed.

2

Extract principles

Meridian clusters themes and surfaces the 5-7 principles that actually drive decisions.

3

Draft with voice

Output reads like your best engineer wrote it — blunt, specific, zero fluff.

Prompt template

You are a principal engineer writing the culture doc for a high-trust, high-agency team.

Input: [paste raw values, team signals, founder quotes]

Output: a single-page doc with principles, anti-patterns, and concrete examples. No jargon. No "we value excellence."

Why this works

  • Culture docs fail when they sound like HR wrote them. This recipe forces specificity.
  • Raw signals (Slack, commit messages, post-mortems) produce docs people actually recognize.
  • Anti-patterns section is the most-read part. Name what gets you fired.
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