| name | update-topic-ledger |
| description | Maintains substacker shared-context/topic-ledger.md as an append-and-update index of all topics in the corpus. Each topic row tracks seed/draft/published counts, last-touched date, top-3 seed ids by density, and a hot/warm/cold temperature indicator. Use after any seed is created, promoted to draft, published, or killed. Trigger keywords — ledger, topic index, update index, topic ledger, hot/cold topics. |
Update Topic Ledger
Table of Contents
Related skills: Called by ingest-inbox-item step 8 for each topic on a new seed. Called by any status-changing agent on promote/publish/kill events.
Ledger row schema
Each topic gets a block in shared-context/topic-ledger.md:
## {topic-slug}
- seeds: N
- drafts: N
- published: N
- last_touched: YYYY-MM-DD
- temperature: hot | warm | cold
- top_seeds:
- {seed-id} (density={N})
- {seed-id} (density={N})
- {seed-id} (density={N})
Workflow
Update ledger for one topic + event:
- [ ] Step 1: Read the ledger; find or create the row for {topic}
- [ ] Step 2: Update counts based on event (ADDED | PROMOTED | PUBLISHED | KILLED)
- [ ] Step 3: Update last_touched = today
- [ ] Step 4: Recompute temperature
- [ ] Step 5: Recompute top_seeds = top 3 by density across all statuses except dead
- [ ] Step 6: Write the updated row back
Step 2: Event → count change
| Event | seeds | drafts | published | dead |
|---|
ADDED (new seed) | +1 | — | — | — |
PROMOTED (seed → draft) | -1 | +1 | — | — |
PUBLISHED (draft → published) | — | -1 | +1 | — |
KILLED (any → dead) | -1, 0, 0 (whichever bucket) | -1 | -1 | +1 |
Temperature rules
hot: last_touched within last 14 days.warm: last_touched 14–60 days ago.cold: last_touched >60 days ago.
Temperature is computed, not stored — recompute on every update.
Worked example
Event: {topic: regularization, event: ADDED, seed_id: 2026-04-21-dropout-as-ensemble-thinned-networks, density: 7}
Existing row:
## regularization
- seeds: 3
- drafts: 1
- published: 1
- last_touched: 2026-03-11
- temperature: warm
- top_seeds:
- 2026-03-11-l2-as-gaussian-prior (density=6)
- 2025-11-14-noise-as-regularization (density=5)
- 2025-09-22-weight-decay-intuition (density=4)
Updated row:
## regularization
- seeds: 4
- drafts: 1
- published: 1
- last_touched: 2026-04-21
- temperature: hot
- top_seeds:
- 2026-04-21-dropout-as-ensemble-thinned-networks (density=7)
- 2026-03-11-l2-as-gaussian-prior (density=6)
- 2025-11-14-noise-as-regularization (density=5)
Guardrails
- Never remove a topic row even if count drops to 0. Mark
temperature: cold to preserve historical signal.
- Never promote a pending tag to canonical silently. The writer reviews
#pending-tags; this skill only updates rows for tags already in canonical.
- Temperature is recomputed every time, not stored. If today differs from last_touched, the temperature reflects today.
top_seeds excludes dead seeds. A seed promoted from seed → draft retains its density score.- Never re-order rows alphabetically in bulk — preserve whatever order the ledger is in (last-touched DESC is the current convention).
- Single-threaded. The Librarian serializes calls so the ledger doesn't race.
Quick reference
- Input:
{topic: str, event: str, seed_id: str, density: int}.
- Output: updated
topic-ledger.md.
- Side effect: single file write with diff-style edit.
