Forest Synthesis Skill

When to Use

When asked for a "forest of forests" synthesis, cross-month pattern extraction, or strategic read across accumulated daily-forest digests. Ideally weekly (not daily. too noisy).

Prerequisites

• Daily-forest digests at outputs/daily-forest/YYYY-MM-DD-daily-forest.md (30+ files)
• Skills system: skills/daily-forest/SKILL.md must exist and be LIVE

Procedure

Step 1. Identify the corpus

ls outputs/daily-forest/*.md | wc -l  # count available files
ls outputs/daily-forest/*.md | head -5  # oldest
ls outputs/daily-forest/*.md | tail -8  # most recent

Step 2. Strategic read via subagent

Spawn a subagent with:

• Read the 8 most recent digests IN FULL
• Read 5-7 selected digests from mid-corpus (pick around sentiment shifts or dates around key events)
• Section-header skim on remaining files
• Goal: identify cross-day patterns invisible to single-day reading

Subagent brief (paste verbatim, replacing N):

Read the daily-forest digests at outputs/daily-forest/. Corpus has ~N files.

Strategy: read last 8 in full, skim 5-7 from mid-corpus, section-header skim the rest.

Extract cross-day patterns in 8 categories:
1. Persistent Movers (appeared 3+ times, same direction)
2. Wave Movers (spiked then faded)
3. Multi-Week Silences (present then absent)
4. Tone Arcs (sentiment shift over time)
5. Long Cross-Stitches (two unrelated themes converging)
6. Late Bloomers (absent early, strong later)
7. Focus-Market-Specific (your market's authorities, regulators, corridors, local players)
8. Platform Ecosystem (releases + tool announcements for platforms you depend on)

End with: ONE structural shift paragraph. The biggest macro pattern the corpus reveals that single-day reading misses entirely.

Output to: outputs/raw/<agent>/YYYY-MM-DD-forest-of-forests-synthesis.md

Step 3. Compress for chat delivery

Extract the ONE structural shift + 3 most actionable operator-specific findings. Deliver to chat as a compressed briefing.

Step 4. Log

echo '{"ts":"'$(date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ)'","category":"forest-synthesis","event":"weekly_synthesis_complete","files_read":N,"output":"outputs/reviewed/<agent>/YYYY-MM-DD..."}' >> logs/session.jsonl

Output format

• Full synthesis: outputs/raw/<agent>/YYYY-MM-DD-forest-of-forests-synthesis.md
• After operator review: move to outputs/reviewed/<agent>/
• Chat message: compressed 8-bullet version, actionable operator-specific first

Cadence

Weekly (Sunday evening or Monday morning). Not daily. Cross-day pattern visibility requires 5+ digests minimum to be useful.

Anti-patterns

• Do NOT skim all files equally. recency weighting matters (last 8 in full)
• Do NOT collapse to keyword counts. cross-day narrative shifts are the goal
• Do NOT skip the focus-market-specific section. that's the primary operator-actionable output