| name | cross-ref-topic-ledger |
| description | For each Trend Scout candidate item, checks substacker shared-context/topic-ledger.md and tags with NEW | OVERLAPS seed:{slug} | OVERLAPS draft:{slug} | OVERLAPS published:{slug}. Adds a reinforcement_angle note for items overlapping with published posts ("external confirmation of X"). Read-only against the ledger. Use after summarize-signal, before rank-by-user-fit. Trigger keywords — cross-ref, ledger check, overlap, reinforcement, dedup external. |
Cross-Ref Topic Ledger
Workflow
Per candidate:
- [ ] Step 1: Parse topic-ledger.md into {slug, title, status, tags, last_touched} records
- [ ] Step 2: Extract 2-5 topic tags from the candidate's summary (reuse ledger vocabulary)
- [ ] Step 3: Match candidate to ledger entries by tag overlap (≥2 shared tags) OR semantic title similarity
- [ ] Step 4: Classify: NEW | OVERLAPS seed:{slug} | OVERLAPS draft:{slug} | OVERLAPS published:{slug}
- [ ] Step 5: If OVERLAPS published, generate reinforcement_angle (1 line)
- [ ] Step 6: Annotate candidate with dedup_status, overlap_slug, reinforcement_angle
Classification rules
- NEW: tag overlap <2 AND title similarity <0.4.
- OVERLAPS seed:{slug}: writer has a seed on this; mention is context but NOT a new seed candidate.
- OVERLAPS draft:{slug}: writer is actively working on this; may absorb external evidence.
- OVERLAPS published:{slug}: writer already shipped on this; becomes reinforcement material for future posts.
Reinforcement angle
When OVERLAPS published: generate a one-line angle the writer could use in a future post.
Example:
- Candidate: Transformer Circuits — "Attention as Soft Nearest-Neighbor Lookup"
- Overlaps: published
attention-as-kernel-regression
- Reinforcement angle: "Anthropic's interp team came at this from circuits; I came at it from kernel regression — same answer."
Guardrails
- Read-only. Never mutate the ledger. Never propose ledger edits here.
- If ledger is stale (>60 days since last touch), emit a warning in digest appendix.
- Borderline matches → prefer
NEW; false negatives (a missed overlap) are worse UX than false positives (a buried genuine thread).
- Reinforcement angles are drafts — writer refines on use. Keep ≤1 sentence.
- Never cross-reference with
corpus/dead/ — dead ideas should stay dead for Trend Scout's purposes.
