One pass over every session newer than the watermark, then stop. acron owns recurrence; never schedule yourself.
This is the unattended backstop for the capture rule in the global AGENTS.md:
that rule fires in the moment and depends on an agent noticing, so it misses
whatever nobody noticed. This pass reads the transcripts those sessions left
behind and files what they should have filed.
State lives in a watermark file, so a tick is idempotent: a quiet day costs one scan and exits.
Rails
- An empty pass is a success. Most days produce nothing durable. Report "nothing to capture", stamp the watermark, and exit. Manufacturing a page to justify the run poisons the second brain with material the user will learn to scroll past — one real capture a week beats seven padded ones.
- Open a pull request; never commit to
main. Every capture is a judgement call made without the user in the room, so the user gets the veto. - Redact before writing. The digest script strips known secret shapes, but it cannot recognise a novel one. Re-read every line you are about to commit for credentials, tokens, customer names, and third-party personal data.
- Cite the transcript, do not copy it. Reference the session path; the raw
transcript already lives under
~/.claudeor~/.codexand does not belong in the repository. - Touch only
wkentaro/secondbrain. Never edit, commit to, or open issues against a source repository this pass merely read about.
The capture test
A candidate earns a page when it is durable and unrecoverable.
Durable — it will still be true and still be wanted in six months:
- A root cause that took real work to find, and the symptom that pointed to it.
- A decision, what it beat, and the constraint that settled it.
- A measured number: a benchmark, a cost, a limit, a timing.
- Third-party behaviour that contradicts its own documentation.
- A workaround, plus the constraint forcing it.
- A policy or preference the user stated that applies beyond the session.
Unrecoverable — reading the repository at HEAD would not tell you. Skip
anything a diff, a commit message, a changelog, or --help already carries.
Judge the two independently and reject on either. When a candidate is borderline, reject it; the watermark moves on and a genuinely durable fact resurfaces in a later session.
0. Preflight
- Set
SKILL_DIRto this skill's own directory, so the commands below run wherever the skill is installed:
SKILL_DIR=<the base directory named when this skill was invoked>
cdto the secondbrain checkout. Abort if the working tree is dirty.- Read
CLAUDE.mdand the target domain'sCLAUDE.md. They own frontmatter, page types, wikilinks, and the_log.mdconvention; this skill does not restate them. - Snapshot the tick start so sessions that begin mid-run are not skipped:
mkdir -p ~/.local/state/secondbrain-harvest
touch ~/.local/state/secondbrain-harvest/.tick
1. List candidates
python3 "$SKILL_DIR"/scripts/digest_sessions.py --list
With no watermark yet it falls back to a 24-hour window. Zero sessions listed ends the tick — jump to step 5.
2. Judge
python3 "$SKILL_DIR"/scripts/digest_sessions.py
Each digest holds the human turns and the agent's prose replies, with reasoning
and tool traffic dropped. Apply the capture test to every digest and write down
a verdict for each, so the count of judged sessions matches the count listed in
step 1. Re-read the full transcript with --only <path> when a digest is
suggestive but too thin to decide.
3. Route
Route each survivor by the global AGENTS.md work-artifact rules. Most land as
a curated page or an edit to an existing one inside a secondbrain topic
folder. Prefer editing an existing page over adding one: grep the domain for
the concept first, and only create a page when nothing covers it. A survivor
that is really an open task belongs in an issue, not a page.
4. Write
Follow the repository's ingest procedure. Every capture cites its session
path inline. Cross-link both directions, update the topic index.md when a
page is new, and append one line per capture to the domain's _log.md.
5. Commit and open the pull request
Nothing captured: stamp the watermark and report the count of sessions judged. Otherwise:
- Branch:
harvest/YYYY-MM-DD. - Commit per the global git rules, splitting by capture when there are several.
- Open the PR with
gh. The body lists each capture as one unwrapped line — what it claims, and the session it came from — plus the number of sessions judged and rejected, so the user can audit the filter rather than trust it. - Stop at the open PR. The user merges.
Stamp the watermark last, once the PR is open:
mv ~/.local/state/secondbrain-harvest/.tick ~/.local/state/secondbrain-harvest/watermark
Leaving the watermark unstamped after a failed tick is correct — the next run re-judges the same window rather than losing it.
Report
Judged: <count>; rejected: <count and session paths>
Captured: <claim> — <literal source transcript path>
Changed: <secondbrain paths>
Redaction before commit: checked credentials, secrets, customer names, and third-party personal data
PR: <branch and URL>; body includes captures and judged/rejected counts
Watermark: <advanced from .tick after an empty pass or successful PR; otherwise unchanged, and why>
Source repositories: untouched
Failure: <failed action>; recovery: <branch or commit> # only on failure