| name | synthesize-learnings |
| description | Distill accumulated notes and lessons from many sessions into durable insight. Use when scattered learnings, journal entries, meeting takeaways, or decisions have piled up across time and need consolidating: "run a retrospective across my notes", "what have I learned", "clean up and promote my lessons", "synthesize my journal", "find the patterns in my notes". This is cross-session synthesis, distinct from writing up one session. Produces a deduped, contradiction-resolved note set, a list of promoted patterns with evidence, and a health summary. |
Synthesize Learnings
A pile of notes is not knowledge until it's distilled. Left alone, learnings duplicate, contradict each other, and rot into noise. This compresses many sessions of accumulated notes into a smaller set of things actually worth keeping, and promotes the few that have earned it into durable rules.
This works across many sessions. For writing up a single effort, use a session wrap-up instead.
1. Gather the accumulated entries
Pull every learning, note, takeaway, or decision in scope: a time range, a topic, or the whole collection. Get them in one place before judging any of them.
2. Analyze across five lenses
Pass the whole set through each lens:
- Cluster: group entries by theme.
- Merge: collapse duplicates into the single strongest wording.
- Resolve: where two entries contradict, settle it with evidence and archive the loser. Never keep both "true."
- Flag stale: mark entries that are old and were never reinforced.
- Identify promotable: spot patterns that recurred across multiple separate occasions.
3. Apply the promotion gate
This is the heart of it. One vivid, excited capture is an anecdote, not a lesson. A pattern earns promotion only when it recurred across multiple independent times. For each candidate, state the evidence: which separate occasions showed it. If you can only point to one, it stays a note.
Promoting on excitement instead of recurrence is exactly how a notes pile fills with confident noise.
4. Act, then confirm
Carry out the merges, the archives (with a one-line reason each), and stage the promotions. Before encoding a promoted pattern as a durable rule, confirm it with the user: promotion changes how future work behaves, so it shouldn't be silent.
5. Report the health of the collection
Summarize the state so the trend is visible over time: how many entries total, how many active, how many stale, how many promoted this pass.
Output
Return:
- The deduped, contradiction-resolved note set (with what was merged and what was archived, and why).
- A list of promoted patterns, each with the recurrence evidence behind it.
- A health summary: total / active / stale / promoted counts.
