| name | extract-situation |
| description | Partial Skill: invoke by name only — the ACED blind-brief extractor — loaded by aced-case-judge to compose a simulating context's brief, not user-triggered. |
| user-invocable | false |
| metadata | {"internal":true} |
extract-situation
The blind-brief extractor — the deterministic engine that reads one scenario out of a frozen
.feature and emits only the situation: its Given and When steps. The scenario name,
every Then, the inline @rubric, and the tags are never emitted. aced-case-judge composes a
simulating context's brief only through this engine; it never decides by its own judgment what to
withhold. It is read-only — it never writes a .feature, a brief, or any other file.
Invocation
node "<skill>/scripts/extract-situation.mts" --feature <path-to-.feature> --scenario "<exact name>"
--format json emits { steps, given, when, placeholders, examples } instead of the markdown brief —
steps is the emitted brief in file order (given/when regroup the same steps by keyword), and
examples carries a Scenario Outline's surviving columns.
What it emits, and what it must never emit
| Element | Emitted | Why |
|---|
Given steps (and an And/But inheriting Given) | yes | the situation the agent is in |
When steps (and an And/But inheriting When) | yes | the act under evaluation |
| Scenario name | never | names state the verdict (red tests block the commit) |
Then steps, and any And/But inheriting Then | never | the expected outcome is the answer key |
Inline @rubric docstring | never | the scoring ladders are worked answers |
Tags, Feature: description, sibling scenarios | never | not the situation |
Keyword inheritance is the load-bearing rule. An And takes the keyword of the step above it:
Given X / And Y makes And Y a Given (emit); Then A / And B makes And B a Then (withhold).
Tracking the current keyword is what keeps the answer key out of the brief.
For a Scenario Outline, <placeholder> tokens stay intact and an Examples column is emitted
only when an emitted step references its placeholder — a column only a Then reads is withheld.
Fail closed
Every failure exits non-zero and emits no brief — an empty brief must never be mistakable for a
valid one. Unreadable or unparseable .feature; scenario name absent; the name matching two
scenarios; --feature or --scenario missing.
References
The contract this engine serves: aced-case-judge's blind two-pass protocol, spec'd at
.agents/specs/aced/sdd-roles/judge/.
