| name | radar-ledger-update |
| description | Safely update TRENDS.md (the AI Radar ledger): append evidence, move stages, manage observation_queue, source_rotation and strategy_notes without breaking the file contract. Use every time TRENDS.md is edited, before committing radar updates, and when promoting or archiving trends.
|
Update the ledger safely
TRENDS.md is the single source of truth and later sessions parse it. The
structure is a contract.
File contract (do not change)
- Header:
# Trend ledger — AI Radar, then Last updated: YYYY-MM-DD, then the
stage legend.
- Sections, in this order:
## Active trends, ## observation_queue,
## source_rotation, ## strategy_notes, ## study_shelf, ## calibration.
## source_rotation and ## calibration are POINTER stubs only: their real
append-only content lives in logs/source_rotation.md and logs/calibration.md
respectively. Keep the two stub headers (the section order is the contract) but
NEVER inline log lines back into TRENDS.md — appends go to the logs/ files.- Trend block:
### [id: slug-NNN] Title with fields alias, optional
pinned: true, stage, confidence, first_observed, last_evidence,
evidence: (list), notes:.
- Evidence line:
- YYYY-MM-DD — URL — one line of context.
Rules
- Match findings to existing trends via id and
alias before creating a new
trend. New trends take the next free NNN and start at seed or emerging.
- ROUTE a captured primary, don't default to "queue it": (a) if it lands on an
EXISTING trend's axis, append it as EVIDENCE there — a single primary suffices
for an existing trend; the ≥3-source bar is only for CREATING a trend; (b) if
the queue now holds ≥3 independent groups on one untracked sub-theme, promote
that cluster to a
seed trend; (c) else it stays a queue item. Leaving an
on-axis primary in the queue (hoarding evidence) or a named primary in report
prose only is a routing failure.
- Max 10 evidence items per trend — drop the oldest. Keep
last_evidence equal
to the newest evidence date.
- Stage moves: at most ONE stage up per trend per day, only on new independent
evidence, justified in
notes. Demotions are always allowed. 21+ days without
evidence → dormant; at 45+ days the weekly pass moves the entry to
ARCHIVE.md as a one-line post-mortem.
- Pinned trends (
pinned: true): NEVER auto-archived, no matter how long
without evidence — they are the curator's standing-watch axes. They still
follow the normal stage rules, INCLUDING going dormant when quiet (the
ledger stays truthful about activity); they simply never leave the board.
Only the curator adds/removes a pin (or the agent proposes it via amendment).
observation_queue items are dated and marked "unverified" unless opened. It
is a WORKING SET (signals pending verification), not a knowledge store — keep it
bounded to a soft cap of ~25 live items by a CAP-DRIVEN burndown that runs every
session, including quiet/no-evidence passes: while the queue is OVER the cap,
resolve the oldest items toward the cap that run regardless of what the scan
found; at/under the cap it stops on its own (resolve only the 1–2 oldest if
stale). This is owed every run, never deferred to the weekly — a no-evidence
pass is not a no-op for the queue. Items leave ONLY by resolution: promoted to a
trend (the signal is captured there) or dropped with a one-line reason in the
day's/week's report (write-once, permanent). NEVER silently delete — because
every removal is either a promotion or a recorded drop, shrinking the queue
loses no knowledge. Re-date an item only if it is genuinely still worth watching.- Append one dated line per session to
logs/source_rotation.md (the coverage
log; not the TRENDS.md stub). Append dated corrections to the strategy_notes
section of TRENDS.md; never delete curator entries.
study_shelf: newest first, format date — [name](url) — one line of why;
single-artifact items allowed (the trend bar does not apply), opened primary
sources only.calibration (now logs/calibration.md) is append-only and written by weekly
runs only (see the radar-self-eval skill); daily runs never touch it.- Update the
Last updated line. Keep everything in English.
Validate before commit
grep -n '^## ' TRENDS.md
grep -c '^### \[id: ' TRENDS.md
grep -nE '^ - [0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2} — ' TRENDS.md | head -3
grep -n '^Last updated:' TRENDS.md
test -f logs/source_rotation.md && tail -1 logs/source_rotation.md | head -c 80
test -f logs/calibration.md && tail -1 logs/calibration.md | head -c 80
awk '/^## source_rotation/{n=0} /^## strategy_notes/{print "rotation stub lines:", n} {n++}' TRENDS.md
If a check fails, fix the file before committing. Commit and push per the
conventions in AGENTS.md.
