survey-open-threads

name	survey-open-threads
description	Mine the ecosystem for open workstreams — paused arcs, abandoned/soft-abandoned sessions, parked design questions — apply the liveness discriminator, and produce two artifacts: registry entries for docs/open-threads/ and a fresh WIP snapshot. Use when the user wants to find loose ends, recover dropped threads, audit what's still open across repos, or refresh the open-threads registry.

Survey Open Threads

Find every open workstream across the rhi ecosystem, separate the live from the dead/superseded/moot, and file the live ones. This is the repeatable version of the 2026-05-24 session-mining pass that seeded docs/open-threads/.

There are two distinct outputs, never one:

1. Registry entries — docs/open-threads/<slug>.md, one file per surviving thread, plus a line in docs/open-threads/index.md. These are durable open questions/arcs that aren't expected to close soon.
2. WIP snapshot — a single timestamped report of what is actively in motion right now (dirty trees, unpushed commits, recent sessions). This is a perishable photograph, not registry material. Hand it to the user; do not file it.

The liveness discriminator (the one judgment that matters)

The open-threads registry is filtered by liveness, not scope. File a thread if it is open work not expected to complete soon — a large arc, a paused or abandoned session, a parked design question — regardless of whether it touches one repo or many. A single-repo question can belong here if it's a genuine unresolved design fork; a multi-repo question does not belong here if it already landed.

For every candidate, decide one of three:

• LIVE → file it (registry or, if cleanly single-repo and tractable, that repo's TODO.md).
• DEAD / SUPERSEDED / MOOT → record one line in the run report saying why it's dead (so the next run doesn't re-surface it), then drop it.
• DONE → the work landed; archive with a one-line pointer to where it landed.

A candidate is only LIVE after the freshness re-check (Step 5) confirms it. Sessions age; "the assistant offered to do X" is not evidence X is still undone.

Where sessions live

• Corpus root: /mnt/ssd/ai/claude-sessions/projects/ — one directory per project (path-encoded, e.g. -home-me-git-rhizone-crescent).
• Query it with normalize sessions (provided by the normalize flake; run from any repo with normalize on PATH). Never hand-parse the JSONL — use the CLI.
• Modes matter: --mode interactive (default) is human-driven work. Exclude autonomous-bot projects (fuwafuwa, ashwren, hologram-bot loops) — they end mid-state by design and rehydrate from brain/*.json; their tails are not abandonment.

Process

Determine the window first. Default: last 60 days (the corpus density cliff and the limit of plausible user recall). Parse $ARGUMENTS as a --since YYYY-MM-DD or --days N override. Record the exact window in the report.

Step 1 — Scope B: the WIP snapshot (do this first, it's the cheap ground truth)

Photograph what is in motion right now. For every repo in the ecosystem table (docs/about.md is the source of truth for the list):

# dirty state + unpushed-commit count, per repo
git -C <repo> status --porcelain
git -C <repo> rev-list --count @{u}..HEAD 2>/dev/null   # unpushed; ignore repos with no upstream

And the recent-session view:

normalize sessions stats --all-projects --days 7 --group-by project,day --json

Write the snapshot as terse per-project bullets — In motion (what the dirty/unpushed work is), Unpushed (count), Uncommitted (the porcelain summary). Bucket untouched repos under a single "Quiet" line. Flag autonomous-bot state files as intentional, not WIP. This artifact is the snapshot output — keep it whole and separate.

Step 2 — Scope A: parked design questions (the registry's core feed)

These are deferred / cross-cutting / convention-shaped questions the user raised but never resolved. Triage broadly, then deep-read the survivors.

# broad triage on user messages across all projects in the window
normalize sessions messages --all-projects --role user --since <date> \
  --grep '<pattern>' --json

Run the grep over several keyword families (one pass each, union the hits):

• deferral: out of scope, later, defer, parked, revisit, for now, come back to
• design-question: should we, do we want, the question is, open question, unresolved, which approach
• cross-project / convention: every repo, all repos, ecosystem, propagate, convention, standard, across projects

Strip task-notification and tooling noise. Then deep-read the ~10 highest-signal hits with normalize sessions show <id> --json. Also mine the in-tree investigation sources directly — they are pre-staged registries:

• docs/introspection/investigations/*/synthesis.md — "Hypotheses no one tested" and "What we still don't know" sections are candidates almost verbatim.
• Each project's TODO.md "Open questions" sections.
• docs/decisions/throughlines.md, docs/claude-code-guide.md.

For each candidate capture: the question, projects touched, first-raised session ID + verbatim user quote, any working answer, and whether a check would settle it.

Step 3 — Scope C: mechanically-abandoned sessions

Sessions cut off mid-execution and never resumed. Enumerate substantial interactive sessions, then read tails.

# candidates: interactive, in-window, non-trivial
normalize sessions list --all-projects --mode interactive --since <date> --json \
  --jq '[.[] | select(.user_messages >= 8 and .duration_seconds >= 120)]'

Read the tail of the top candidates (normalize sessions show <id> --json, last assistant/tool event). Abandoned signals:

• final event is [Request interrupted by user for tool use] or [Request interrupted by user] and no successor session continued the work;
• session ends mid-tool (an ExitPlanMode/Bash/etc. call that never resolved — process killed).

Not abandonment (exclude): explicit closers (Done. Pushed. Clean. Bye!), a /handoff ExitPlanMode plan (intentional close — the plan landed in TODO.md), or autonomous-bot end-states.

Plan file derivation for Scope C and C2

When a session's tail references a handoff or plan — the assistant said "Let me write the handoff:", or ExitPlanMode was called, or the session mentions a plan file — derive and verify the plan file on disk:

• Main session plan: ~/.claude/plans/{slug}.md
• Subagent plan: ~/.claude/plans/{slug}-agent-{agentId}.md
• slug is a top-level field on every session JSONL record (format: adjective-verb-noun, e.g. vivid-juggling-crescent). It is the plan filename stem.
• agentId is a top-level field on subagent transcript records (hex string, e.g. ae9580d70fe0c1a83); it is also the agent-{agentId} stem of the transcript filename.

slug present does not imply the plan file exists. A plan file only exists if ExitPlanMode was actually called. After deriving the path, stat it:

# verify plan file on disk before surfacing it
stat ~/.claude/plans/<slug>.md 2>/dev/null && echo EXISTS || echo ABSENT

• If the file exists, surface the exact path in the run report — the thread is immediately actionable.
• If the file is absent, note plan/handoff referenced, no plan file found at ~/.claude/plans/<slug>.md rather than emitting a dead path.

Note: the only prior art for plan-file access in this ecosystem (normalize's plans.rs plans_dir()) merely lists the plans directory and does not derive per-session paths. This derivation is the skill's own.

Step 4 — Scope C2: soft-abandoned sessions (the dominant, easily-missed population)

Sessions where the assistant's final message implies more work and the user simply moved on. Forward-looking sign-offs are not closers. This is the largest and most overlooked bucket.

Extract the final assistant message of each in-window interactive session and pattern-match the tail:

normalize sessions messages --all-projects --role assistant --since <date> \
  --grep '<soft-abandon pattern>' --json

Soft-abandon tail signals: want me to, shall i, should we, let me know if, next:, remaining:, what would you like, we still need, a trailing ?, conditional offers ("Ready to dispatch?", "Want me to start implementing X?"), or a mid-flow truncation ("Let me write the handoff:" with nothing after). When any of these signals fire, also check for a plan file using the derivation in the Plan file derivation section above.

Filter out the false positives: tails that say "Let me write the handoff / ready for handoff / Final session summary" mean the /handoff skill ran — those are intentional closes, not loose ends.

Half of the true positives are recoverable as "the work persisted via commit/TODO.md, the assistant just didn't say 'done'." The other half are genuine loose ends — the concrete Want me to…? offers and design-deferral observations are the highest-value finds.

Step 5 — Freshness / liveness re-check (mandatory before filing anything LIVE)

Sessions are stale photographs. Before promoting any candidate from Steps 2–4 to LIVE, verify against current reality:

• "Verify X landed" — if a tail said "8 commits ready to push" or "Want me to implement the warning diagnostics?", check the repo: git -C <repo> log --oneline --since=<session-date>, grep the code, read the current TODO.md. If it landed → mark DONE, archive. If still absent → LIVE.
• Successor sessions — did a later session pick up the thread? normalize sessions list --project <p> --since <session-date>. If a successor resolved it → DONE/SUPERSEDED.
• Superseded by a rewrite — large plans (e.g. a v4 typechecker plan) are often obsoleted by later redesigns. If the design moved on → SUPERSEDED, not LIVE.
• Already filed — cross-check docs/open-threads/index.md and the project TODO.md; don't duplicate.

Only candidates that survive this check are LIVE.

Step 6 — Dedup and route

Collapse candidates that are the same thread under different sessions. Then route each survivor:

• Registry — open question/arc, not expected to close soon, or genuinely cross-cutting → write docs/open-threads/<slug>.md.
• Project TODO.md — cleanly single-repo and tractable within that repo → add the item there (if the repo is dirty, the ecosystem rule applies: add to its TODO.md rather than making other changes).
• Record-and-drop — DEAD/MOOT → one line in the run report with the reason.

Use a clear functional slug for the filename; do not invent project-style names — describe the question (harness-orchestrator-fit.md, design-decisions-convention.md).

Step 7 — Write the two artifacts

Registry files — one .md per LIVE thread, matching the existing shape in docs/open-threads/worldbuilding-namespace.md:

# <Thread title: the question in a phrase>

**Project(s) touched:** <list, or "all (cross-cutting)">

**Status:** Open — <one-line state>

**Surfaced in:** <session IDs / file paths, with verbatim quote where load-bearing>

---

## The question
## Working answer        (or "none")
## What's still open
## Cross-project angle    (why it lives here, if applicable)

Then add a one-line entry to docs/open-threads/index.md under ## Threads, linking the new file with a one-sentence gloss.

Run report (this is the survey's primary return value — give it to the user, don't necessarily commit it). Structure:

• Window scanned and corpus size (sessions / projects, from stats).
• Scope B WIP snapshot (Step 1), whole and separate.
• LIVE → filed: each thread, where it was filed (registry vs which TODO.md).
• DONE / SUPERSEDED / MOOT: each candidate + the one-line reason it's not live (this is what keeps the next run from re-mining the same dead threads).
• Needs user attention: the small set of genuinely-abandoned recent sessions (Step 3/4 survivors) ranked by recency — these are the resumable ones. For each entry that has a verified plan file on disk, include the exact path (~/.claude/plans/<slug>.md) directly in the entry so the thread is immediately actionable without further lookup.

If a staging file is warranted (large pass, many candidates to triage with the user before promotion), write it to drafts/ and delete it once promotion is complete — that is what drafts/open-threads-candidates.md was.

Anti-patterns

• Don't conflate the two outputs. The WIP snapshot is perishable and never goes in the registry; the registry is durable and never holds a git status photograph.
• Don't file on a stale read. A session tail offering to do X is not evidence X is undone. Step 5 is not optional.
• Don't treat forward-looking sign-offs as closes (the Scope C2 lesson) — but do treat /handoff plans, explicit closers, and bot end-states as closes.
• Don't hand-parse the session JSONL. Use normalize sessions; it knows the formats.
• Don't re-surface known-dead threads. If a prior run recorded a thread as DEAD/SUPERSEDED, honor that unless new evidence revives it.
• Don't suggest project names. Slugs describe the question, nothing more.
• Don't emit an unverified plan file path. A session having a slug field does not mean a plan file exists — ExitPlanMode must have been called. Always stat before surfacing; always note when the path is absent rather than silently dropping it.