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
parent e20b321055
commit a2d7e3ea92
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---
name: executive-summary-writing
description: Writing the three-part item entry — what it is, why it matters to us, what to do — so a digest is readable in two minutes.
when_to_use: You are writing digest or analysis entries for harvested research items.
tags: [research, writing]
---
# The three-part entry
Every item gets exactly three parts. The shape is the discipline: it makes the
omissions visible.
**What it is** — one sentence, what they actually did. Not what it enables, not
why it is exciting. If you cannot state the contribution in one sentence you
have not finished reading.
**Why it matters to us** — the named project, file or open question it touches.
If nothing applies, the item does not belong in the digest. That rule is what
keeps a digest from becoming a feed.
**What to do about it** — one decision, from a closed set:
```
read fully worth an hour of someone's time
add to backlog a concrete change we should make
ignore seen, judged, not for us
escalate changes a plan we are currently executing
```
## Decide; do not hedge
"Consider evaluating whether this might inform our approach" is four words of
decision wrapped in ten of insulation. Write `ignore` or write `add to backlog`.
Being wrong in a specific direction is recoverable; being vague is not, because
nobody can tell later whether the call was right.
## Two minutes, total
Not two minutes per item — two minutes for the digest. Five items at three
sentences each is roughly the budget. If an item needs more, it is not a digest
entry, it is a reading note: link to it and keep the entry short.
## Frontmatter carries the ratio
```yaml
---
date: 2026-08-17
harvested: 23
surfaced: 4
---
```
Harvested-versus-surfaced tracked over time is how you notice selectivity drift.
A run that surfaces everything has stopped filtering; a run that surfaces
nothing for a week is either a quiet field or a broken harvest, and the counts
are what tell you which.