extract-situation

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/.