nicsuzor/daily

Daily Note

Compose and maintain the daily note at $ACA_DATA/daily/YYYYMMDD-daily.md (filename uses today's date, date +%Y%m%d). On every run, point the symlink at it: ln -snf daily/YYYYMMDD-daily.md $ACA_DATA/daily.md.

Fill out the template in references/note-template.md. That file is the structural SSoT — follow its section order.

What this note is

A factual, reportive snapshot of the day: what happened, what's open, what's due, what's in the inbox. It is not prescriptive — never rank what the user should do next or suggest a sequence. Forward prioritisation is the user's, in ### My priorities (create the empty heading; never write under it).

Core rules

• Frontmatter MUST set type: daily. This is the canonical-path derivation key: the storage path is derived from this field alone, so a note written or regenerated without it is misfiled by definition. Verify the field is present before the first write and after every regeneration; never let a fallback path (e.g. type: note) stand in silently.
• Update throughout the day. Re-run freely; update in place with Edit, not full rewrites. Consolidate where it helps readability.
• Never remove user notes. Preserve everything the user wrote, plus their ticks ([x]) and annotations, across regenerations. Match items by ID/PR/subject and carry ticks forward.
• You may turn user notes into neat, well-formatted prose — but only if you lose no truth. When unsure, keep the original wording.
• No empty sections. Omit a section rather than render an empty heading. On a morning with no sessions yet, omit Today's Log entirely.
• Today's Log is reconstructed from primary sources, never substituted. Before writing Today's Log you MUST open today's session transcripts — $AOPS_SESSIONS/transcripts/$(date +%Y-%m)/$(date +%Y%m%d)-*-claude-*.md (prefer -abridged.md) — and reconstruct the day from them. Assembling it from artifacts already in the note (prior retro stamps, yesterday's log) or from the reconcile sweep's merged-PR list is a criterion substitution: it reproduces the file, not the day. If no same-day interactive transcript exists, omit the section — do not back-fill it from second-hand artifacts.
• Prompt Ledger is generated, never hand-transcribed. If $AOPS_SESSIONS/state/prompt_ledger.md is missing or stale (not regenerated today), refresh it: uv run python aops-core/scripts/transcript.py --ledger --since <7-days-ago> from the academicOps checkout. Tail its most recent ~10 lines into ## Prompt Ledger verbatim. Never write ledger lines by hand and never fill in a blank outcome/link yourself — they're blank because the pipeline couldn't honestly resolve them from the session summary, not because the field was skipped.

Tools you may invoke

Available, not mandatory steps. Use them when the day's content calls for them:

• /email --daily — triage the inbox into tasks + FYI items.
• /q — capture a task (e.g. routing a mobile capture from $ACA_DATA/notes/mobile-captures/; delete the original with mcp__pkb__delete once it's routed).
• /remember — persist durable knowledge.
• /decision-extract — expand the pending-decisions list if the user wants detail.
• /strategy — if the user signals they want a priorities reset.

Safety rules (load-bearing)

• Verify carryover against live PKB before listing. For each task carried from yesterday, call mcp__pkb__get_task; drop it if it's missing, done, cancelled, or already ticked in today's note. Copying blindly produces phantom-overdue items.
• PR display state may read $AOPS_SESSIONS/state/pr-state.json for the "Outstanding Workflows" / open-PR snapshot (it is cheap and good enough for a display list). Do NOT run a bulk gh pr list just to populate that display. The reconcile sweep below is the exception: it resolves and checks PRs one task at a time against live gh, because a pre-baked feed's recent-window misses older merges and silently leaves tasks parked.
• Consequence text is printed verbatim, never paraphrased. Pull it from the task, or from a linked target in the task's goals field.
• Counts come from mcp__pkb__task_summary. Never count tasks yourself — aggregation is the PKB's job.

Escalated deadlines (simple rule)

Hoist a due task into a ## 🚨 ESCALATED DEADLINES callout when it meets any of these conditions:

• Overdue (past due date) AND ≥ SEV2; or
• Due within ~2 days AND ≥ SEV3; or
• Due within ~2 days AND ≥ SEV2 AND on an immovable external deadline.

Render its verbatim consequence text; drop it from the Status deadline list to avoid duplication. Do not hoist movable SEV2 tasks unless they are also overdue — that is false urgency inflation. Do not compute tiers or ratios — the full escalation model lives in [[importance-visibility-escalation]], and a follow-up PKB-tool task will compute a real escalation tier upstream.

Reconcile and cross-link

Two statuses, two fates — do not conflate them

• status: merge_ready = parked on a PR. Under review — PR open, awaiting CI, review, or iteration ([[taxonomy#status-values-and-transitions]] is the SSoT for the full protocol). The PR is the source of truth for whether it can close.
• status: review = parked on a human. Actionable work waiting on Nic's (or an agent's) judgment, not on a merge ([[taxonomy#status-values-and-transitions]]). Most status: review tasks have no PR at all — reading notes, design decisions, "needs Nic's direction" items.

Never auto-close a review task. Its close is always a decision, never a PR match — even a PR showing MERGED is evidence, not authority. Surface every review task under "Needs your call" every run; it must never silently disappear as if it were parked PR backlog.

Task completion sweep (required every run)

Resolve PRs against live GitHub, not the pre-baked pr-state.json feed — its recent_merged is a recent-window snapshot and misses older merges. The canonical reconcile contract is [[workflows-reconcile]]: structured fields (pr_url, else branch, else a repo-qualified PR number) drive the match, gh confirms the state.

For each merge_ready task: resolve its PR and check the live state. MERGED closes the task (mcp__pkb__complete_task, citing the PR URL and merge time as evidence). OPEN leaves it parked. CLOSED-without-merge, or unresolvable to a concrete <repo>#<number>, is surfaced under "Needs your call" instead of auto-closed.

For each review task: resolve any linked PR the same way, but its state is evidence only, never grounds for a close — surface it regardless, with its title and one-line ask. A review item with no actionable ask at all (e.g. a reading note that was never really a task) is surfaced as mis-statused so Nic can re-file or drop it.

Guards, both passes: never close on doubt (an unresolved condition flagged in the task body beats a MERGED PR); never cascade-close a parent whose children are still open; never touch academic, peer-review, or Nic-decision items — these are always surfaced, never auto-closed.

Report in the daily note: tasks auto-closed against merged PRs, review tasks re-surfaced awaiting a decision, tasks surfaced for a call.

Stale-claim & ready-queue reconcile (required every run)

This is the scheduled-sweep counterpart to the task-lifecycle skill's point-of-claim gates ([[aops-pkb/skills/task-lifecycle/SKILL.md]] §2b Freshness pre-check) — those check a task once, at the moment something tries to select it; this catches claims made and then silently dropped, and stale premises on tasks nobody has tried to select since they went stale. Owned here, not in /sleep: /daily runs on Nic's actual cold-open cadence — a habitual, human-triggered surface that fires whether or not any automation does — while GHA cron cadence is known-unreliable (aops-bdfb52d4: the merge-prep cron drifted to ~hourly and stalled outright for 5h on a 30m schedule) and /sleep's own loop fires only on manual invocation or that same class of cron. A reconcile step that lives only where it might not fire closes no loops. This complements, does not replace, /sleep's longer-horizon checks — Phase 6 Activity 2 (90-day evidence-based staleness verification) and Phase 7 Gate-1 (14-day artifact-rot check on ready/queued) stay owned by /sleep; do not re-implement them here.

Stale-claim pass. mcp__pkb__list_tasks(status="in_progress", before=<today - 2 days>, format="json") (cap 30/run). For each candidate:

• If type is epic or the task has children (a parent task spanning multi-session work), skip it this run unless it has also been untouched for ≥14 days — 2 days of quiet on a container task is normal, not abandonment.
• Skip any task whose body reads as a live Nic-led TALK/interactive session (explicit "waiting on Nic being live" / "do not dispatch to a worker" framing, or similar) — those are meant to sit in_progress across sessions; a long gap is not abandonment.
• Otherwise read the body and check for completion evidence (linked PR merged, a commit referencing the task ID, a same-day transcript closing statement) — same evidence classes as /sleep Phase 6 Activity 2. Decide exactly one:
  • (a) Completed — evidence found → mcp__pkb__complete_task(id, completion_evidence="<what was found>", pr_url=<if any>).
  • (b) Abandoned, premise still valid — no completion evidence and nothing in the body says the work is no longer wanted → mcp__pkb__update_task(id, updates={status: "queued", assignee: null}), then mcp__pkb__append(id, content="Released by /daily stale-claim reconcile YYYY-MM-DD: in_progress since <date>, no activity or completion evidence found — returned to queue for redispatch."). Return it to queued — the state it was dispatched from, already past the premise gate — never promote it further.
  • (c) Premise gone or superseded — the body shows the goal no longer applies (superseded, overtaken by a sibling, or blocked on something since resolved a different way) → do not cancel or delete. mcp__pkb__update_task(id, updates={needs_triage: true}), then mcp__pkb__append(id, content="Flagged by /daily stale-claim reconcile YYYY-MM-DD: premise appears superseded/gone — <one-line reason>. Needs a human close, not auto-cancel.").

Ready-queue premise pass. Runs once per calendar day, not every /daily invocation (guard: skip if $ACA_DATA/state/ready-queue-reconcile-cursor.json already records today's date; write today's date after running). mcp__pkb__list_tasks(status="ready", before=<today - 2 days>) and mcp__pkb__list_tasks(status="queued", before=<today - 2 days>) (cap 30 each). For each candidate, check the two signals the point-of-claim gate can only catch when a select is actually attempted:

1. superseded_by set but status is still ready/queued — should have moved to cancelled at supersession time and didn't.
2. All siblings under the same parent are done/cancelled (via mcp__pkb__get_task_children on the parent) and this task's body reads like it belonged to the same finished batch — likely a leftover from a completed decomposition (same heuristic as the task-lifecycle stale-leftover check, applied proactively instead of waiting for a select attempt).

Artifact-existence rot (named file/symbol no longer present) is not re-checked here — that stays /sleep Phase 7 Gate-1's job at its own cadence. For every match: mcp__pkb__append(id, content="Flagged by /daily ready-queue reconcile YYYY-MM-DD: <reason>. Left as-is for human review."). Flag, never hard-delete or auto-cancel.

Report in the daily note: one summary line in ## Work Log (Stale-claim reconcile: N closed, M released, K flagged. Ready-queue reconcile: J flagged.) plus every flagged item (both passes) listed under "Needs your call" in ## What Needs Attention, with task ID and the one-line reason.

Cross-linking (when a session maps to a task)

You may append a ## Progress note or tick checklist items on a task that today's accomplishment maps to. Never mark a parent task done, never delete task content.

Output

Commit the note (don't leave it for the sync): cd "$ACA_DATA" && git add "daily/$(date +%Y%m%d)-daily.md" daily.md && { git diff --cached --quiet || git commit -m "daily: note for $(date +%Y-%m-%d)"; } — the guard makes no-op re-runs exit 0. If a pre-commit hook fails, let it surface; don't bypass it. Then end with a one-line confirmation: "Daily note updated. Use /pull to start work." and halt.