radar-ledger-update

name	radar-ledger-update
description	Safely update TRENDS.md (the AI Radar ledger): append evidence, move stages, manage observation_queue, source_rotation and strategy_notes without breaking the file contract. Use every time TRENDS.md is edited, before committing radar updates, and when promoting or archiving trends.

Update the ledger safely

TRENDS.md is the single source of truth and later sessions parse it. The structure is a contract.

File contract (do not change)

• Header: # Trend ledger — AI Radar, then Last updated: YYYY-MM-DD, then the stage legend.
• Sections, in this order: ## Active trends, ## observation_queue, ## source_rotation, ## strategy_notes, ## study_shelf, ## calibration.
• ## source_rotation and ## calibration are POINTER stubs only: their real append-only content lives in logs/source_rotation.md and logs/calibration.md respectively. Keep the two stub headers (the section order is the contract) but NEVER inline log lines back into TRENDS.md — appends go to the logs/ files.
• Trend block: ### [id: slug-NNN] Title with fields alias, optional pinned: true, stage, confidence, first_observed, last_evidence, evidence: (list), notes:.
• Evidence line: - YYYY-MM-DD — URL — one line of context.

Rules

• Match findings to existing trends via id and alias before creating a new trend. New trends take the next free NNN and start at seed or emerging.
• ROUTE a captured primary, don't default to "queue it": (a) if it lands on an EXISTING trend's axis, append it as EVIDENCE there — a single primary suffices for an existing trend; the ≥3-source bar is only for CREATING a trend; (b) if the queue now holds ≥3 independent groups on one untracked sub-theme, promote that cluster to a seed trend; (c) else it stays a queue item. Leaving an on-axis primary in the queue (hoarding evidence) or a named primary in report prose only is a routing failure.
• Max 10 evidence items per trend — drop the oldest. Keep last_evidence equal to the newest evidence date.
• Stage moves: at most ONE stage up per trend per day, only on new independent evidence, justified in notes. Demotions are always allowed. 21+ days without evidence → dormant; at 45+ days the weekly pass moves the entry to ARCHIVE.md as a one-line post-mortem.
• Pinned trends (pinned: true): NEVER auto-archived, no matter how long without evidence — they are the curator's standing-watch axes. They still follow the normal stage rules, INCLUDING going dormant when quiet (the ledger stays truthful about activity); they simply never leave the board. Only the curator adds/removes a pin (or the agent proposes it via amendment).
• observation_queue items are dated and marked "unverified" unless opened. It is a WORKING SET (signals pending verification), not a knowledge store — keep it bounded to a soft cap of ~25 live items by a CAP-DRIVEN burndown that runs every session, including quiet/no-evidence passes: while the queue is OVER the cap, resolve the oldest items toward the cap that run regardless of what the scan found; at/under the cap it stops on its own (resolve only the 1–2 oldest if stale). This is owed every run, never deferred to the weekly — a no-evidence pass is not a no-op for the queue. Items leave ONLY by resolution: promoted to a trend (the signal is captured there) or dropped with a one-line reason in the day's/week's report (write-once, permanent). NEVER silently delete — because every removal is either a promotion or a recorded drop, shrinking the queue loses no knowledge. Re-date an item only if it is genuinely still worth watching.
• Append one dated line per session to logs/source_rotation.md (the coverage log; not the TRENDS.md stub). Append dated corrections to the strategy_notes section of TRENDS.md; never delete curator entries.
• study_shelf: newest first, format date — [name](url) — one line of why; single-artifact items allowed (the trend bar does not apply), opened primary sources only.
• calibration (now logs/calibration.md) is append-only and written by weekly runs only (see the radar-self-eval skill); daily runs never touch it.
• Update the Last updated line. Keep everything in English.

Validate before commit

grep -n '^## ' TRENDS.md
# expected, in order: Active trends, observation_queue, source_rotation, strategy_notes, study_shelf, calibration
grep -c '^### \[id: ' TRENDS.md          # trend count matches expectations
grep -nE '^  - [0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2} — ' TRENDS.md | head -3   # evidence format
grep -n '^Last updated:' TRENDS.md       # date is today
# the two externalized logs must exist and only grow (append-only):
test -f logs/source_rotation.md && tail -1 logs/source_rotation.md | head -c 80
test -f logs/calibration.md && tail -1 logs/calibration.md | head -c 80
# TRENDS.md must NOT have regrown a log body (the stubs stay one-line pointers):
awk '/^## source_rotation/{n=0} /^## strategy_notes/{print "rotation stub lines:", n} {n++}' TRENDS.md

If a check fails, fix the file before committing. Commit and push per the conventions in AGENTS.md.