Inkstone - Teaching Taste to an Agent

An Inkstone is one of the Four Treasures of the Study (文房四寶, wénfáng sìbǎo) — the stone slab on which an ink stick is ground with water to produce ink before painting or writing. The other three treasures are the brush (筆), ink stick (墨), and paper (紙).

I named my Claude Code plugin after it because these skills do the same thing — they're the preparatory step. You put in a classical Chinese verse, and what comes out is ready to paint with.

The plugin was built for https://sixlines.online — 4,096 ink paintings generated from the Jiaoshi Yilin (焦氏易林), a Han dynasty book of I-Ching poems from ~40 BC. Every painting started as 12 classical Chinese characters. The Inkstone skills turned them into image prompts.

The methodology is now open source. Two skills: one that generates ink painting prompts from any classical verse, one that produces bilingual scholarly explanations (English + Traditional Chinese). Install in Claude Code with two lines (details further down).

Full Blog on how the image pipeline was built: https://augustinchan.dev/posts/2026-02-14-teaching-taste-to-agents-yilin-image-pipeline

GitHub: https://github.com/augchan42/inkstone

To install from Claude Code:
/plugin marketplace add augchan42/inkstone
/plugin install inkstone@augchan42-inkstone