Digest

User preferences, learned signals, and the sent-item log live in ~/Clawic/data/digest/ (see setup.md on first use, preferences-template.md for file formats). If you have data at an old location (~/digest/ or ~/clawic/digest/), move it to ~/Clawic/data/digest/.

Configuration

User-dependent variables. Defaults apply until the user states a preference; store them in ~/Clawic/data/digest/config.yaml.

Preference areas — learned state lives in ~/Clawic/data/digest/preferences.md and climbs the ladder in learning.md:

• content scope — topics, industries, competitors, people, regions, exclusions; drives Filter
• sourcing — trusted and blocked sources, weighting, recency windows; drives Source
• format & structure — medium, structure, length, tone, visuals; drives Format
• timing & cadence — schedule, frequency, weekday/weekend split, urgent-signal rules; drives Deliver
• prioritization & depth — what leads, what buries, per-topic depth; drives Prioritize

When To Use

• The user wants a recurring daily or weekly briefing on topics they care about
• A news roundup filtered to one person's interests, not a generic feed
• Tracking competitors, an industry, people, or markets with ongoing updates on their moves
• A scheduled topic update is due, or the source list needs building or tuning
• An existing digest feels off: too long, repetitive, missing stories, wrong timing
• Not for: synthesizing documents the user hands you (→ synthesize), internal business reporting (→ brief), or full competitor dossiers (→ competitor-monitoring)

The test of a real digest: every item carries a why-this-matters-to-you line. A digest that could be sent to anyone is a feed, not a digest.

Quick Reference

Depth on demand: sources.md building and vetting the source list · triage.md dedupe, ranking, slow and heavy days · verification.md claims, rumors, corrections · writing.md item craft and summaries · delivery.md channels, timing, interrupts · learning.md signals and the preference ladder · competitors.md tracking companies and people · dimensions.md dimension catalog with defaults · preferences-template.md data-file formats.

Core Rules

1. Relevance beats magnitude. Rank by interest match first, freshness second, source weight third. A tracked competitor's pricing change outranks a world-news headline outside their topics.
2. Every item is attributed. No source you can name = item does not ship. Never blend your own inference into a summary unmarked — prefix it: "Likely:" or "My read:".
3. Exclusions are binary, interests are weighted. One explicit "don't care about Y" beats any number of inferred interest signals for Y. An excluded topic appears only when it intersects a confirmed interest, flagged as such ("normally excluded; included because it hits X").
4. Dedupe before ranking. Same story from N outlets = one item; N itself is rank input — 3+ independent sources covering one story promotes it toward Highlights. Independence = separate original evidence, not separate URLs (verification.md).
5. Fixed budget forces curation. item_cap (default 8) items, hard max 3 Highlights. Adding one over cap means deleting one. Worked example: 12 candidates → 3 Highlights (top interest-match), 5 body items, remaining 4 dropped or compressed into one Worth Noting line.
6. Preference changes climb a ladder — pattern → confirmed → locked, mechanics in learning.md. Never jump from a single signal to locked.
7. The digest remembers what it sent. Log every shipped item to ~/Clawic/data/digest/sent-log.md; repeats resurface only as "Update:" + delta. A digest without memory re-reports yesterday and reads as a broken filter.

Protocol

Source → Filter → Prioritize → Format → Deliver → Learn

1. Source — pull from configured feeds and the per-entity source kits (sources.md). Default weighting: primary > original reporting > aggregators > social; social is discovery, never citation — trace it back before it ships.
2. Filter — topic match includes; exclusion match drops (rule 3); recency windows per content type (dimensions.md → Sources); single-source surprising claims go to verification.md.
3. Prioritize — cluster duplicates, then rank per rule 1; bury borderline items into Worth Noting, don't delete (triage.md).
4. Format — per-item shape: headline → 1-line summary → why it matters to this user → (source). Craft rules in writing.md; length pressure cuts item count before per-item depth.
5. Deliver — channel and timing per preferences; interrupts, catch-ups, and per-channel formats in delivery.md.
6. Learn — capture reactions into preferences.md after every delivery; signal counting and ladder in learning.md.

Output Format (Default)

📰 [DIGEST TYPE] — [DATE/TIME]

🔥 HIGHLIGHTS
• [Item — 1-line summary + why it matters to you (source)]
• [Second item]

📋 FULL DIGEST
[Items in per-item shape, ordered per weighting profile]

💡 WORTH NOTING
[Borderline items, one line each]

---
Sources: [count] | Next digest: [time]

Adapt entirely to learned preferences once they exist; the template above is only the cold-start default.

Output Gates

Before sending, verify:

• Every item has a source and a why-it-matters line?
• ≤3 Highlights, each strong enough that the user could read only those?
• Zero exclusion-list items, unless flagged per rule 3?
• Every single-source claim hedged or held per single_source_policy?
• Nothing repeated unchanged from the sent log?
• Channel and time match current preferences; signals from the previous delivery recorded?

Traps

Where Experts Disagree

• Curation vs completeness. Tight curation is the default — the budget is the product. Some readers want everything as FOMO insurance; the boundary is an explicit request, and the answer is a longer Worth Noting tail, never a bigger Highlights section.
• Relevance-first vs breaking-first. Default: highest interest-match leads. Breaking-first is legitimate for users who act on time-sensitivity (markets, on-call, PR); it must be learned or stated, never assumed from topic choice.
• Neutral summarizer vs opinionated curator. The why-it-matters line is opinion, and it is the digest's value. The boundary: reporting is attributed, inference is prefixed — the reader always knows which is which (rule 2).

Related Skills

More Clawic skills, get them at https://clawic.com/skills/digest (install if the user confirms):

• brief — internal business information summarized rather than external news curated
• synthesize — the user provides the documents; you distill instead of sourcing the outside world
• competitor-monitoring — full competitor dossiers, pricing alerts, and positioning analysis beyond digest items
• newsletter — the user wants to publish to an audience, not receive a personal digest

Feedback

• If useful, star it: https://clawic.com/skills/digest
• Latest version: https://clawic.com/skills/digest

Part of Clawic, the verified skill library. Get this skill: https://clawic.com/skills/digest.