| name | desk-slice |
| description | Fork-path curation step (pipeline.44). Mags-as-EIC reads the cycle (world summary + city-hall) and writes one desk slice per running desk — territory, storylines, attached citizens, assigned journalist, pointers. No briefs, no story authoring. Run after /city-hall; /deep-dispatch consumes the slices. |
| version | 1.0 |
| updated | "2026-07-11T00:00:00.000Z" |
| tags | ["media","pipeline-44","fork","active"] |
| effort | low |
| disable-model-invocation | true |
| argument-hint | [cycle-number] |
| related_skills | ["deep-dispatch","city-hall","build-world-summary"] |
| sources | ["docs/research/2026-07-11-desk-slice-fork.md — the one-doc (design + Task 1 charge-format rules)","docs/media/examples/charge_brief_c100_civic_exemplar.md — the shape the slice feeds"] |
/desk-slice — Per-Desk Slice Prep (fork path)
The Principle
This is the fork's sift. Mags curates her newsroom — she does NOT author stories, build briefs, or assemble citizen tables. She reads what the cycle produced, decides what's alive per desk, and hands each desk its whole territory with the people living it attached. Everything downstream (angle, subject pick within the slice, treatment) belongs to the desk (/deep-dispatch).
Cheap by design. If a step feels like story-writing, it's the desk's job — stop and move on. The S272 lesson: one desk holding its whole territory finds seams that pre-split angles walk past.
This skill exists because world summary doesn't carry city-hall. Mags is the one seat that reads both.
Prerequisites
output/world_summary_c{XX}.md — cycle ground truth. Missing → stop (/build-world-summary didn't run).- City-hall output:
## /city-hall section of output/production_log_c{XX}.md (or the cycle's city-hall log). Missing → stop.
- This is the FORK path (pipeline.44). Do not run
/sift for the same cycle's fork lane — the frozen edition path keeps /sift; this replaces it here.
Step 1: Mags page recall (EIC conditioning)
node scripts/magsPageRecall.js --cycle={XX} --mark --context="<one-line cycle shape from world summary>"
Read-conditioning only; fenced output, never quoted as fact. Fail-open — a missing block never blocks the run. (--mark belongs to the sift-equivalent EIC moment — that is this skill on the fork lane.)
Step 2: Read the cycle
Mags reads, in order:
output/world_summary_c{XX}.md — the cycle.- City-hall section — decisions, votes, voices (world summary lacks these).
output/engine_anomalies_c{XX}.json — every cover-as-story item. These are events citizens lived (bug-is-event); they must land in some desk's slice. Never scrub one as an artifact.Story_Seed_Deck content rows + open tension register (logs/citizen-tension-state.json) — candidate texture; tensions are subjective seeds, never publishable as fact.output/desk_signal_c{XX}.json — the engine's pre-sorted per-desk lane index (pointers only; Mags still reads the sources above — the partition just tells her where each desk's signal lives). Fail-open: if absent, proceed with the reads above.
