Digest

Curates news, feeds, and industry sources into personalized recurring digests: sourcing, filtering, ranking, and delivery. Use to set up a daily briefing or morning/evening news roundup, track competitors, an industry, people, or markets, or run a scheduled or weekly update. Also when a digest feels too long or repetitive, keeps missing stories, or a rumor needs checking before it ships. Covers source vetting, deduplication, single-source holds, corrections, urgent alerts, slow news days, and channel formats (email, Slack, Telegram, audio); learns format, timing, and depth preferences from reactions. Not for summarizing documents the user provides or internal business reporting.

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.

Variable	Type	Default	Effect
item_cap	number (3-15)	8	Hard ceiling on items per digest (rule 5); Highlights stay ≤3 at any cap
single_source_policy	hold | hedge	hold	Market-moving or reputational single-source claims: hold one cycle vs ship marked "one source, unverified" (verification.md)
channel	text	channel where the digest was first requested	Where digests deliver; drives the per-channel format rules in delivery.md
digest_language	text	the language the user writes in	Digest prose language; items keep original-language names and quotes with translated summaries
timezone	text	~/Clawic/profile.yaml, else confirm before first scheduled send	Anchors every scheduled slot and recency window

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

Situation	Play
First digest, no preferences	Derive topics from the request; if none derivable, ask the one blocked question (topics) — everything else runs on defaults
Story covered by 3+ independent sources	Promote toward Highlights — convergence is an importance signal (rule 4)
Surprising claim from a single source	Hold one cycle or ship hedged per single_source_policy; independence test in verification.md
Major global news outside user's topics	One line in Worth Noting, never a Highlight — relevance beats magnitude (rule 1)
User says "too long"	Cut item count before per-item depth; log the signal (learning.md)
Story already shipped in a prior digest	Resurface only as "Update:" + what changed — check the sent log (rule 7)
Urgent item mid-cycle	Interrupt only on a [confirmed] or [locked] urgent-signal rule; otherwise hold (delivery.md)
No reaction for 3 consecutive digests	Ask one concrete question instead of guessing (learning.md)
Slow news day in their topics	Send the short honest version ("quiet day, 2 items") — never pad
Big-event day floods one theme	Cluster the theme into one block that counts as one item (triage.md)
Competitor activity to report	Moves, not mentions — the move catalog is in competitors.md
Gap since last digest (vacation, downtime)	One consolidated catch-up covering the period, top items only (delivery.md)
Anything else	Run Source → Filter → Prioritize → Format → Deliver → Learn with current preferences

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

text

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)

text

📰 [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

Trap	Why it fails	Do instead
Leading with globally important news	User already saw it everywhere; the digest adds zero	Lead with niche relevance; big news gets one line (rule 1)
Padding slow days	Trains skimming; erodes trust in Highlights	Short honest digest ("quiet day")
Counting syndicated copies as corroboration	Ten outlets rewriting one press release or tweet are one source	Independence test in verification.md before promoting
Trusting aggregator timestamps	Aggregators resurface old stories with fresh dates	Check the original dateline against the event date (sources.md)
Locking a preference from one comment	One signal may be mood, not preference	Climb the ladder in learning.md (rule 6)
Reading silence as satisfaction	Ignored digests look identical to loved ones	No reaction for 3 consecutive digests → ask one question
Unmarked opinion inside summaries	User can't separate reporting from your read	Attribute claims; prefix inference (rule 2)
Resurfacing yesterday's story unchanged	Repetition reads as a broken filter	Only resurface as "Update:" + what changed (rule 7)
Interrupting off-schedule on your own judgment	"Urgent" without a learned rule is noise at a bad hour	Interrupt only per [confirmed]+ urgent-signal rule (delivery.md)

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.