/radar-pulse

name: radar-pulse
description: |
  Iterate the FULL social/community + trusted-curator source lists in SOURCES.md (Reddit, Hacker News, YouTube curators, explainer/digest pointer blogs, Hugging Face, best-effort X/Instagram) on every daily run — every listed entry, fetched by its recorded access method, NOT a sampled subset. Social/curator is an INTAKE LANE ONLY — it can feed observation_queue (unverified) and a community-pulse note, but NEVER becomes trend evidence. Use after the lab sweep.

Community pulse — intake only, never evidence

Social tells you what people *think* and what is gaining traction before it reaches papers/docs, and it is often the FASTEST place to spot that something official exists (a post links a repo, a release, a paper). Social is not a primary source — but it is a discovery accelerator. This skill captures both without corroding the ledger's evidence standard.

The platform/channel/profile list lives in `SOURCES.md`; treat it as a seed and curate it by your own judgment — add platforms and accounts that prove useful, drop noise. Don't restrict yourself to a fixed roster.

Absolute rules (constitutional carve-out — see AGENTS.md Hard rules)

1. Social NEVER becomes trend evidence. It may only:

• create `observation_queue` items, marked `unverified` — promotable to a

trend ONLY after the claim is confirmed on a primary artifact (paper, repo, release, official doc), via the `radar-source-verify` skill;

• feed the community-pulse note surfaced on the dashboard (Phase 3).

2. Never name or quote individuals in the repo. Link the thread/profile and summarise the signal ("a widely-upvoted r/LocalLLaMA thread reports X"). No handles in evidence/queue text beyond the bare URL. 3. Opened-source rule still applies: only log what you actually fetched. 4. **Per-channel coverage logging (APPLIED 2026-08-29, W35 — was W34 Proposal O, cooling period held, signal persisted: the W34 coverage miss RECURRED on 08-24 when the daily collapsed the whole Phase-2 lane into a single `PULSE (HN…)` line, and the strategy_notes discipline note alone reverted on the first post-weekly Monday — so codify it in the loaded skill):** the pulse lane's line in `logs/source_rotation.md` MUST enumerate EACH Phase-2 channel touched this run — HN, the Reddit sub-groups, each YouTube curator, each digest/pointer blog (tldrsec, Simon Willison, Kai Greshake, Embrace The Red), Hugging Face — BY NAME with `opened` or `degraded: <reason>`, exactly as the primary-feed lane logs each feed. NEVER collapse the lane into one HN line: a Phase-2 channel absent from the log line is a coverage lie identical to a missing primary feed (an unlogged degrade reads the same as a forgotten source). Grouping several SAME-status channels in one sub-clause is fine (`Reddit / tldrsec / Willison → degraded: tvly-plan-cap`) as long as each is NAMED; a bare `PULSE (HN…)` line is not. This makes the coverage-discipline hard rule more precise; it relaxes nothing.

• **4a. Quiet/seasonal lanes are named EVEN WHEN they yield nothing (APPLIED 2026-09-12,

W37 — was W36 Proposal Q, cooling period held, signal PERSISTED and WORSENED: the YouTube-curator lane (Microsoft Developer / Black Hat channels) dropped off the per-channel pulse log on 2/5 dailies in W36 and 5/5 in W37 — a 3rd/4th consecutive-week Phase-2 miss that rule 4 alone did not close, because the lane silently collapses precisely on QUIET days when it has no on-axis item):** a lane that legitimately produces nothing is NOT thereby excused from the log — a "no on-axis this run" lane and an "I forgot to check" lane read identically if both are absent, which is the whole failure. So every run MUST emit a status token for EACH YouTube curator and each seasonal showcase lane even on a quiet/off-season day, drawn from exactly: `opened/no-on-axis`, `degraded: <reason>`, or `off-season (next: <event/month>)`. Omission is a coverage lie; "quiet" is a status to LOG, never a reason to drop the line.

Method (best-effort via Tavily, no paid APIs)

Per run, ITERATE EVERY entry in the source lists at `SOURCES.md` (see "## Source lists" below) — the list is the CONTRACT: execute all of it, do not "sample" a representative subset (sampling is exactly how feed-less entries get silently dropped while the easy RSS ones get done). "Light" means SHALLOW per source (read the new items' titles), NEVER skipping a source: the CHECK (fetch each entry and see what is new since the last pass) is owed EVERY run, even one minute after another pass; only the EXTRACT (follow a new item to its primary and verify) is conditional on something new. A skipped source is not "light", it is a missed lane. For each source, by category:

• **Reddit**: read the TOP posts of the tracked subreddits — both the technical

subs AND the broad-pulse subs. Note two things, not one: (a) recurring on-axis topics, and (b) whatever is *dominating* a community right now, on-axis or not.

• **Hacker News**: read the FRONT PAGE unconditionally (the #1 story is a

don't-miss), in addition to term searches.

• **Trusted curators (YouTube + explainer/digest pointer blogs) — a PRIMARY DISCOVERY path, not "social noise":** ITERATE EVERY entry in the SOURCES.md curator lists, one by one, with the SAME discipline as the lab sweep — not a sampled subset. For each entry, fetch by its recorded access method: its feed if it has one, else `tvly extract` of its index/page (exactly as the lab sweep does for feed-less NVIDIA/Meta). A feed-less entry is NEVER a reason to skip — if it has no recorded method, that is a `radar-source-heal` job, not a drop. Log each entry as opened OR `degraded: <reason>`; a listed entry absent from the coverage log is a coverage lie. For every new video/post, FOLLOW the link to the named primary and verify it (`radar-source-verify`); cite the primary, never the curator. This is how hi