Diary Digest

diary-digest

Turn a fat append-only journal into durable automation. The journal already paid for the mistakes; this skill makes sure each one is paid for once. It is the repeatable version of a manual harvest — profile, mine in parallel, reflect, propose gates, persist.

Principle (see global rule on mechanical gates): a lesson that lives only as prose in the log will be skipped again under pressure. The harvest is not done until each recurring mistake has a proposed mechanical gate (hook / script / lint / test / checklist), not just a paragraph.

Steps

1. Locate & profile

Find the journal (default discipline/DIARY.md; accept a path arg). Profile it cheaply before reading — this sizes the fan-out and surfaces the penalty taxonomy:

F="${1:-discipline/DIARY.md}"
wc -l "$F"
grep -Ec '^## ' "$F"                 # entry count
grep -Eo '\[[a-z][a-z-]+\]' "$F" | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -30   # penalty taxonomy, by frequency

The penalty histogram is the single highest-signal artifact. Any label with count ≥2 is a recurring mistake and MUST end the harvest with a proposed gate.

Then read the digest watermark so you don't re-mine what a prior digest already covered:

grep -n '
EOF

digested_through_line is cumulative (prior runs + this one); next_start_line is where the next digest begins. Each run appends its own marker; grep … | tail -1 always finds the active one.

7. Report & propose — do NOT auto-edit the constitution

Output: the k0-k4 reflection + the family table (family → frequency → proposed gate → status). Then propose deliverables:

• new skills/subagents for repeated manual work (SKILL-CANDIDATES with 2+ hits) → can create directly under ~/.claude/skills/ or project .claude/skills/
• new discipline rules → PROPOSE and confirm before editing any global ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md (the constitution is human-ratified; "propor" ≠ "editar").
• project-specific technical gold → the project's ETERNAL.md (on-demand, per rule #19), not here.

Guardrails

• Read-only on the journal's content. The only write allowed is appending a watermark marker at EOF (step 6) — never edit or "clean up" existing entries; the journal is append-only (rule #5).
• Don't fabricate gates. If a mistake has no clean mechanical gate, say so and route it to a checklist/HUMAN.md instead of inventing a brittle hook.
• Cross-project safe: hardcode nothing about a specific company/stack. Read the journal's own taxonomy.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: sfaustodev
• Source: sfaustodev/discipline
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.