ckb/.agents/skills/ckb-ingest/SKILL.md

name

description

ckb-ingest

Process raw/inbox/ (or raw/ directly if the inbox is empty) into the structured wiki/ — consult the cascade, extract typed entities and relationships, synthesize frontmatted pages, cross-link them, update the index and log, then remind the user to review and sync to origin. Use when the user says "Ingest", "Sync the wiki", or "Update the Wiki". This is the content-level workflow routed by CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md, distinct from the git-level `ckb-sync-changes` skill (which reconciles this repo's own history with its `origin` remote and does no wiki synthesis at all).

Ingest skill

Purpose

Turn raw, unstructured material in raw/inbox/ (notes, links, pasted text, scratch files) into the local, mutable, structured wiki/ — the top layer of the cascade that overlays read-only upstream KBs in linked/ and libs/. This is the primary way the wiki grows. It is implemented as a skill (rather than living inline in CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md) so the full ingestion procedure only loads into context when actually invoked.

This skill only ever writes to wiki/ (and moves processed files within raw/). It never touches linked/ or libs/ — those are immutable upstream sources of truth — and it never touches this repo's own git remote; pushing the resulting changes is a separate, explicit step (see Step 8).

Trigger phrases

Use this skill when the user says:

• "Ingest"
• "Sync the wiki"
• "Update the wiki"

Do not use this skill for "sync changes", "sync with git/origin", or "reconcile git" — those are git-level operations with nothing to do with wiki content, handled by the ckb-sync-changes skill instead (see .agents/skills/ckb-sync-changes/SKILL.md). This skill and that one are deliberately separate: this one turns raw material into wiki pages; that one commits/pulls/pushes whatever is currently on disk, wiki changes included.

How to run this skill

Step 1 — Process the inbox

Scan raw/inbox/ for new material. After ingesting each item, move it to raw/archive/<YYYY-MM-DD>/, where the date is today's ingestion date (create the dated folder if it doesn't exist yet).

If raw/inbox/ is empty, scan raw/ directly instead — excluding raw/archive/, which holds material already processed by a previous ingest.

Step 2 — Consult the cascade

Before writing anything, check whether the entity already exists: local wiki/ first, then each linked/<name>/, then each libs/<name>/ (alphabetical within each layer). The local wiki/ always wins — upstream content is informative context, but it can be overridden locally rather than treated as final.

Step 3 — Extract entities

Identify typed entities in the source material — people, projects, libraries, concepts, systems. Create entity pages at wiki/entities/<entity-name>.md if they don't already exist. Record typed relationships between entities as edge data in wiki/graph/edges.json, using the closed vocabulary in wiki/graph/index.md — part_of, uses, depends_on, produces, configures, validates, implements, caused, contradicts, supersedes. Each verb is defined there by the question it answers; if the relationship you have in mind doesn't answer one of those questions, it belongs in the page's prose, not in the graph.

Also record has_expertise_in and owns edges when the material actually evidences them: has_expertise_in when a person demonstrably answers questions or explains decisions on a topic, owns when they hold declared responsibility for a system, area, or decision. These are what make "who knows about X" and "who owns X" answerable as a direct graph lookup instead of a full-text guess (see ckb-retrieve Step 3). Record them only from demonstrated evidence — someone being present in a meeting or cc'd on a thread is not expertise, and don't infer ownership from job title alone. Both are optional, like every other edge type; an absent edge is better than a fabricated one.

Decisions are not entity pages. When the material records a choice that was actually made — a call with a rationale, a date, and someone who made it — that belongs in wiki/decisions/ as a numbered decision record, not in wiki/entities/. Use ckb-decide's format (it owns the field set, the numbering, and the two-sided supersession links) and record them in chronological order so decision numbers run in the same order as the decisions. Two things worth being strict about, because ingest is where they go wrong: a proposal that was discussed but not settled is status: proposed, never accepted; and where the source doesn't say who decided, decided_by: unknown beats attributing it to whoever was loudest in the notes. If the material only references a decision without recording it ("as agreed last quarter, we use Postgres"), that's a query-gap candidate, not a decision record — you don't have the rationale or the date.

For recurring teams, clients, systems, or initiatives, consider whether a plain project scope page under wiki/projects/<name>.md would make future queries easier to route. A scope page should list when to use it, included wiki/entity/source paths, exclusions, and refresh hints. Create one only when the source material shows a real repeated scope; don't manufacture scopes for one-off facts.

Step 4 — Blast radius: what does this material invalidate?

Ingest is additive by habit, which is how a wiki accumulates two pages that quietly disagree. Before writing anything, find out what the incoming material lands on.

For every entity from Step 3 that already has a page, walk wiki/graph/edges.json backwards — every edge whose to is that page — one hop out. That set, plus the entity pages themselves, is the blast radius: the pages whose claims could be affected by what just arrived. Read their tldrs (and the bodies of any that look genuinely exposed) and sort each one into:

• Confirms — the new material agrees. Note it; corroboration is a reason to raise confidence in Step 5, not to rewrite anything.
• Extends — the new material adds detail the page doesn't have. Update the page in Step 5.
• Contradicts — the new material and the page can't both be right. This is the case worth catching: handle it as supersession (see Edge cases), and say so explicitly in the report rather than letting the newer page silently win.
• Untouched — most of the radius. Drop it and move on.

Name the owners too. Where an owns or has_expertise_in edge points at an affected page, that person is who should review the change — surface them in the Step 8 report. Skip this step entirely when Step 3 produced no entity that already exists; a first ingest into an empty wiki has no radius.

Step 5 — Synthesize pages

Convert the core knowledge into clean, modular Markdown files. Every page gets frontmatter with:

• A tldr: — one sentence, optimised for LLM reading.
• A confidence: score (0.0–1.0, based on source corroboration).
• A quality: self-score (0.0–1.0).
• A last_updated: timestamp.
• A freshness_window_days: appropriate to the topic.
• A retention: level.

type is also required (per the page frontmatter schema in CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md page schema) — set it once, based on the entity/content kind (person, project, concept, library, decision, playbook, ...).

Every synthesized page ends with the reserved body sections from the page schema. ## Sources and ## Crux are written here; ## Notes is created empty and never touched again:

## Sources

- `raw/archive/2026-09-21/kickoff-notes.md` — sha256:3f9a2c1e (checked 2026-09-21)
- `raw/archive/2026-09-21/access-thread.eml` — sha256:be40d7aa (checked 2026-09-21)

## Crux

> FDEs need the VDI *and* a Jira account before day one; the VDI request
> alone takes ten working days.
— `raw/archive/2026-09-21/kickoff-notes.md`, under "Access"

## Notes

<!-- Yours. Never rewritten by any skill. -->

Compute each fingerprint from the archived file, not from memory:

sha256sum raw/archive/<date>/<file> | cut -c1-8

Record the digest the page was actually built from. That is what lets ckb-lint tell "old but still accurate" apart from "the source changed underneath this page" without asking a model — a calendar window can't distinguish those. When a page is built from exactly one source, also set source_fingerprint and source_checked in frontmatter.

## Crux is quoted, never paraphrased. Lift the handful of lines that actually carry the claim — the number, the constraint, the condition, the commitment — verbatim, and attribute each quote to the source bullet it came from. Three to ten lines is the working range; a Crux approaching the length of the summary has stopped being evidence and become a second copy of the source. The synthesis above it says what the material means; the Crux is what it said, so a reader can check the first against the second. This is also what lets ckb-retrieve ground an answer without opening the archive every time.

A page with no quotable source — synthesized from conversation, or from material too diffuse to quote — simply has no ## Crux. An empty or paraphrased one is worse than none, because it looks like evidence.

For long conversations, meeting notes, transcripts, or chat exports, use a structured distillation before writing the final page:

• Question or searchable problem statement, when there is one.
• Summary of the thread/note.
• Resolution or Decision, if the material contains one.
• Systems and code references mentioned.
• People involved or apparent owners/experts.
• High-signal excerpts for dense technical paragraphs or consecutive messages that would be lost in a single summary.

"High-signal" needs an acceptance test, or every excerpt looks worth keeping and the page becomes a second copy of the transcript. Promote a run of text to its own section or linked page only when it clears all three:

• It carries a rare term. Something specific enough that a future search would use it — a config flag, an error string, a hostname, a contract clause, a version number. Check with rg -c across wiki/: if the term already appears on many pages it isn't a distinguishing handle, and the excerpt adds no findability the summary doesn't have.
• It's substantial. Roughly 200 characters or more, or a few consecutive paragraphs/messages from one author. A one-line "yes, do that" is a resolution to fold into Resolution, not an excerpt.
• Something corroborates it. It was agreed with, acted on, corrected, or referred back to later in the material. An unanswered assertion is a claim, not a settled fact — keep it in the summary with that ambiguity intact rather than promoting it.

Fail any one of the three and the content still belongs in the page, just inside Summary/Resolution rather than as its own retrievable unit.

When you do promote an excerpt, carry its parent topic with it — the thread question or section heading it sat under. An excerpt that reads unambiguously on its own is the entire point; one that needs the surrounding transcript to make sense hasn't been extracted, only moved.

Step 6 — Link and cross-reference

Use both [[Wikilinks]] (Obsidian-compatible) and standard [markdown](path.md) links on every cross-reference, so the wiki works in Obsidian, GitHub, and CLI tools alike. Where useful, reference upstream files directly at linked/<name>/... or libs/<name>/....

Step 7 — Update index and log

Add new pages to the routing table in wiki/index.md with a Use when description. If the page lives in a subdirectory, also add it to that subdirectory's own index.md. Append a log entry to the most specific applicable log — the subdirectory's log.md if it has one, otherwise the root wiki/log.md — following the format in Rule B (CLAUDE.md/ AGENTS.md Rule B).

If this step creates a brand-new wiki/<topic>/ subdirectory, immediately create that subdirectory's index.md per the Recursive Index & Log Convention.

If this step creates or updates a project scope under wiki/projects/, also update wiki/projects/index.md. If ingest closes a previously recorded question in wiki/query-gaps.md, move that entry from Open to Resolved and mention the page or source that now answers it.

Step 8 — Report, then remind to review and sync

Report what changed before the reminder: pages created vs. updated, and — from Step 4 — which existing pages the new material confirmed, extended, or contradicted, naming the owner of each contradicted page. A contradiction resolved silently is the one outcome of an ingest a reviewer must not have to discover for themselves.

Then close with a short reminder — do not sync or push anything yourself here, and do not skip this even if the changes look small or obviously correct:

"Ingest complete — wiki/ has been updated (see wiki/log.md for the details). Please review the changes, and once you're happy with them, say 'sync changes' to commit and push them to origin."

If nothing was actually ingested (empty inbox and empty raw/, nothing to process), skip this reminder — there's nothing to review or sync.

Edge cases

• Inbox and raw/ both empty — report that there's nothing to ingest. Don't touch wiki/, and skip the Step 8 reminder.
• Item in inbox doesn't yield a clear entity or page (too vague, pure scratch note with no durable fact) — don't force a page into existence. Still move the item to raw/archive/<YYYY-MM-DD>/ since it's been considered, but note in the ingest report that it produced no wiki change.
• Conflicting information vs. an existing local wiki page — this is a supersession case handled consistently with ckb-lint, not a silent overwrite: update the existing page if the new source is clearly more current/corroborated, and link supersedes/superseded_by if an older version is worth preserving rather than edited in place.
• Material duplicates an upstream (linked//libs/) page with nothing new to add — don't create a redundant local page just to have one; the cascade already surfaces the upstream page. Only write locally when overriding, correcting, or adding to what upstream says.

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Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 — see LICENSE at the repository root, or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.