concept-synthesis, From Raw Stubs to Intellectual Map

Convention: see conventions/quality.md for back-link enforcement and quote-fidelity requirements.

Convention: see _brain-filing-rules.md, > output files under concepts/ per the primary-subject rule.

What this solves

Many ingestion pipelines (signal-detector, idea-ingest, voice-note-ingest) create a concept page for every idea mentioned. Over months this produces:

• Thousands of stub pages, many duplicates or near-duplicates
• Timeline entries that repeat the same source across multiple concept pages
• No synthesis, just "the user mentioned X on this date"
• No tier assignments, everything flat
• No clustering, related ideas aren't linked

This skill transforms that raw material into a curated intellectual map.

Architecture

Phase 1: Dedup + merge (deterministic)
  N stubs → ~N/4 canonical concepts
    ├── Jaccard dedup (word-overlap on titles + first-paragraph)
    ├── Substring dedup ("founder mode" vs "founder mode vs manager mode")
    ├── Semantic dedup (LLM: "are these the same idea?")
    └── Merge timelines + aliases from duplicates into the canonical page

Phase 2: Score + tier (deterministic + heuristic)
  Each canonical concept → scored and tiered
    ├── Frequency: distinct sources referencing this concept
    ├── Timespan: first mention → last mention in days
    ├── Breadth: distinct months it appears in
    ├── Engagement: avg engagement on concept-bearing sources (if available)
    └── Tier: T1 Canon | T2 Developing | T3 Speculative | T4 Riff