knowledge-briefing
A knowledge base only speaks when spoken to. knowledge-hygiene and
knowledge-synthesize answer when you invoke them — but nothing tells you what
changed or what needs you today on its own. knowledge-briefing is the part
that comes to you: a short, grounded summary on a cadence, so the blocker
recorded yesterday isn’t invisible until someone thinks to ask.
What it solves
The expensive failure of a knowledge base is “you didn’t know to look.” Across a handful of areas — six repos, a dozen contexts — no one holds the whole picture in their head, and the thing that needed attention sat unread because checking every corner by hand is nobody’s job. A briefing flips that: the base reports its own state, instead of waiting to be queried area by area.
How it works
The deterministic core (octopus briefing) does the mechanical work; the skill
narrates it.
- A per-root watermark (stored privately, never in a team repo) records when you last looked, so each run is a true since you last saw it — not a fixed window you have to remember to pass.
- The change-delta — the briefing’s own signal — is the set of nodes updated since that watermark.
- For the “needs you” section it composes the sibling engines rather than
recomputing:
octopus hygiene’s warnings (overdue, stale, broken), and on--weekly,octopus synthesize’s new connections. - Every line is grounded — it cites the source node it came from and invents nothing. The narration runs on the cheapest model tier, because turning a delta into prose is light work, not reasoning.
--daily advances the watermark (so the next run picks up where this left off);
--weekly is a window-only rollup that leaves the watermark untouched. The
cadence itself is hosted by a scheduler — the skill is one run.
Usage & parameters
octopus briefing [--root <id>] [--daily | --weekly] [--since <window>]| Flag | What it does | Default |
|---|---|---|
--root <id> | Brief on one knowledge root. | every resolved root |
--daily | Attention briefing; advances the watermark. | this is the default |
--weekly | Narrated rollup over a 7-day window; leaves the watermark untouched. | — |
--since <window> | Override the window for one run (e.g. "3 days") without touching the watermark. | the stored watermark |