The template is dead. Long live context

The productivity world has one main currency for sharing experience: the template. Someone builds a system that works for them, lays it out in Notion — or in xTiles, in our case — and shares it. Thousands of people copy it.

Then they close it and never come back.

A template is an empty form of someone else’s life. It has the structure, but not what the structure was built for: the person’s context, their tasks, their rhythm. You copy the columns, not the thinking. And very soon you find the borrowed form doesn’t fit.

Why templates and courses don’t save us

Courses about tools tell the same story. We once discussed an idea for a course specifically about xTiles, and the key question was: why would someone take a course about a particular tool rather than a general course on productivity?

For complex tools like Notion or Obsidian, such courses really are onboarding support. They’re needed because without them people simply can’t figure the tool out. But that treats the symptom. People don’t come for the tool — they come to become organised.

Templates and courses share one flaw: they pass on the author’s experience in a frozen form. The person has to translate it into their own life themselves. And that’s exactly the step where most people stop.

Expertise as context

LLMs change exactly that step. Translating someone else’s experience into your life can now be done not by you, but by your agent.

Picture an author with a useful method — for planning, relocating, renovating, launching a small business. Instead of a template, they package their expertise as context for an LLM: principles, sequence, typical mistakes, questions worth asking yourself.

A person takes that context and hands it to their agent. The agent adapts it to their situation: their timeline, their budget, their constraints. And then it keeps running the project with them — updating the state, reminding, suggesting the next move.

Expertise stops being a frozen form. It becomes living context that works for one specific person.

No template: your own project, your own agent

We went further and tried to do without a template at all. A person builds their own project with their own Claude or GPT, and we provide only the skills — how to put a project’s structure together properly. Not ready-made content, but a way to assemble it.

Recently we tested this on relocation — moving to another country. Our standard project-building skill worked well without any special template. The agent worked out on its own which stages were needed, which risks mattered, which questions had to be closed first.

In this model, responsibility for the content lies with the person and their LLM. What we sell isn’t content but an asset — the structure in which that content lives and moves.

Agents follow rules

Interestingly, the niche of shared public projects is still pretty blurry. I looked for direct alternatives and found almost none. Maybe the market doesn’t exist yet.

Of course, when people write by hand, forums, social networks or Wikipedia handle collective knowledge better. People don’t like filling in someone else’s structure; they just want to write.

But we’re suggesting using agents, and that’s a different story. Agents are ready to do more than a person would, and they can follow rules. A structure a person would see as bureaucracy is, for an agent, just an instruction. So a format that would never take off with manual input can work when an agent fills it in.

The human author doesn’t disappear

This isn’t a story about agents replacing authors. Quite the opposite.

When we were thinking about mini-courses, I realised something: users need not one course but at least ten. Then everyone finds an author they see themselves in. People want to see people behind the experience.

We see the same principle when we give the tool to teachers and tutors. The agent helps make learning personal and asynchronous — a separate plan for each student. But the teacher stays in the process. They set the direction, and the agent makes that direction fit this particular person.

So the template isn’t dying because authors’ experience is no longer needed. It’s dying because experience has found a better form — not frozen, but alive. Context that works for you, not a form you have to fill in.