Skip to main content
  • Status: accepted · Date: 2026-07-27 · Deciders: Davor Runje

​
Context

defend verifies the author’s grasp of their own material decisions and, via cited-work, whether a citation supports a specific sentence. There is no inbound counterpart: a skill for reading an external paper with verified comprehension — building and checking understanding of the whole paper, not just one cited sentence — before it’s triaged, positioned, or cited. defendable-science#68 filed this gap, motivated by davorrunje/mononet’s survey-monotonicity-ml reading list (~21 method papers a literature scout run surfaced, which must be genuinely read and understood, not skimmed) and that consumer repo’s existing hand-curated-digest convention.

​
Decision drivers

  • Reuse defend’s probe → teach → re-probe mechanic rather than reinventing it, since the underlying learning-science grounding (understanding-and-defense.md) is direction-agnostic.
  • The direction is genuinely inverted from defend: verifying grasp of someone else’s (established, external) content, vs. defending your own (possibly novel) decision. defend’s never-supply-a-novel-claim’s-answer rule doesn’t apply the same way — a published paper’s content isn’t a novel claim needing protection.
  • The output differs materially: a new digest artifact + a triage.yml update, not an in-place patch to an existing lifecycle artifact. defend’s existing TARGETS enum (claim, cited-work, methodology) models three ways of probing your own material — an inbound direction doesn’t fit that enum’s semantics.

​
Considered options

  1. Dedicated digest skill, cross-cutting alongside progress/defend, with its own SKILL.md, own trigger conditions, own output shape — sharing defend’s accountability-record mechanism (ADR-0033) but not its skill file. (chosen)
  2. defend --target paper-comprehension — extend defend’s existing TARGETS and SKILL.md instead of adding a new skill file.
  3. Fold into literature as a third mode alongside scout/position.

​
Decision

Option 1. digest is self-invoked (the author picks a paper to read) or fired as an escalation from defend --target cited-work when that probe finds the citation is misunderstood or misrepresented — reusing defend’s existing guardrail stop/offer/log semantics rather than inventing a new guardrail mechanism. Default persona is sounding board (a first-read/ tutoring context), not defend’s critical-examiner default. Output: docs/research/literature/digests/<citekey>.md + a triage.yml update; progress gains an independent “literature reading” roll-up view.

​
Consequences

  • defend’s SKILL.md needs only a small, additive edit (the cited-work target row gets the escalation note) — not a rewrite or a semantic overload of its TARGETS enum.
  • One more skill file to maintain, but each of defend/digest stays legible on its own — a reader of digest doesn’t have to parse defend’s outbound-direction guardrail semantics to understand it.
  • literature’s SKILL.md and progress’s SKILL.md each need a small, additive edit (composition note; new roll-up section) — no restructuring.

​
Rejected alternatives

  • defend --target paper-comprehension (option 2) — would overload TARGETS’ enum semantics (three outbound, one inbound) and mix defend’s guardrail-at-material-decision framing with a self-invoked, non-guardrail-by- default reading workflow; the shared record mechanism (ADR-0033) already gets the reuse benefit without this cost.
  • Fold into literature (option 3) — literature’s two modes (scout/position) are both citation-graph operations; digest’s core is a Socratic loop, not a graph operation, even though it grounds in literature’s registry. Composition (literature’s Composition section) gets the benefit without conflating the two.
skills/digest/SKILL.md; skills/defend/SKILL.md (the cited-work escalation note); skills/literature/SKILL.md (Composition); skills/progress/SKILL.md (literature reading roll-up); ADR-0033 (the shared evidentiary record mechanism); ADR-0015 (defend’s original design); defendable-science#68.