feat(skills): author the Continuous Research skills, and make its roles honest
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The boot log has said `continuous_research — 4 role skills bound, 8 unresolved`
on every start. Those eight roles ran without the instructions their template
promised them, silently: `skills_loader` reports the miss and carries on.

Worse than the missing files was what the prompts described. v1 told the
harvester to sweep "RSS feeds, GitHub trending, HN front page, YouTube /
podcast RSS" — none of which exist. `harvest.rs` searches arXiv and nothing
else. A role prompt describing a machine that was never built is the failure
this codebase keeps paying for, so v2 describes the machine that exists.

Roles now match the pipeline: paper_reader (the harvest already ran; read the
manifest and the papers), signal_ranker (unchanged in spirit), script_writer
(the podcast half, which had no role at all).

Seven skills authored under skills/research/, kebab-case to match the loader —
team_template_loader.rs:177-181 documents the snake_case/kebab-case trap that
already unbinds skills elsewhere:

  arxiv-daily                  what the harvest guarantees, so an agent does
                               NOT re-search arXiv and corrupt the seen-set
  paper-to-project-relevance   name a file or roadmap item, or say "no bearing"
  duplicate-detection          the seen-set catches identity; this catches the
                               same work under a different id
  signal-to-noise-ranking      novelty/relevance/depth, and the two biases to
                               resist (recency up, inconvenience down)
  executive-summary-writing    what it is / why it matters / what to do — decide,
                               do not hedge
  obsidian-vault-conventions   the vault is a human's live workspace; never
                               main, never reorganise, hash the body not the file
  podcast-dialogue-writing     write for someone on a treadmill; the 10-70 char
                               highlight bound is the API's, not a style rule

`web_fetch` dropped from mcp_bundles: runtime_provision.rs binds every mission
claw to `["clawmates_door"]` and never reads that field, so declaring it
instructed roles to use a tool that never arrived. The prompts say `curl` via
Bash, which is what they actually have.

Boot now reports `continuous_research — 11 role skills bound`, with no
unresolved clause. 344 tests pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
This commit is contained in:
Omar Sobh
2026-08-17 14:44:03 -07:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
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---
name: arxiv-daily
description: What the arXiv harvest already guarantees, and what an agent must therefore not redo.
when_to_use: You are working with a harvest manifest in a Continuous Research mission.
tags: [research, sources]
---
# The harvest is already done when you start
Searching arXiv is not your job. Before your phase launches, the server has
already run the harvest: searched each topic, checked the seen-set, downloaded
each new PDF, verified it, shelved it in blob storage and written a vault note.
It takes seconds and it is deterministic.
Your input is the result:
```
ContinuousResearch/<date>/harvest.jsonl
{ source, url, title, snippet, first_seen, topic_tags }
```
One line per paper that is **new since the last run**. Papers already covered
are not in it — by design, not omission.
## What that guarantees
- **No repeats across runs.** `corpus_items` is keyed `arxiv:<id>` with the
version suffix stripped, so `2401.12345v3` cannot reappear as new because
`v1` was seen. This is the entire reason a recurring mission is worth having.
- **Every shelved paper has a real PDF.** Fetched bytes are rejected unless they
start with `%PDF` — arXiv serves an HTML holding page while a paper renders,
and shelving that would leave an unreadable file behind a checkmark.
- **A failed download stays unseen.** The checkmark is written last, after the
PDF and the note are both on disk, so a paper that failed halfway is retried
next run rather than being lost behind a mark that says it was handled.
## What that means for you
- **Do not search arXiv yourself.** Anything you find outside the manifest is
either already covered or was deliberately not selected, and shelving it
outside the pipeline leaves the seen-set wrong.
- **Do not treat an empty manifest as a failure.** A quiet day is a real
outcome. Say "nothing new today" and stop — do not go looking for something to
talk about.
- **Do read the paper.** The manifest's `snippet` is a trimmed abstract, and the
abstract is the authors' pitch. `curl` the arXiv abstract page for the rest.
What a paper claims and what its evaluation shows differ often enough that
catching the gap is most of the value you add.