morning-brief - SKILL.md Agent Skill

name: morning-brief description: Pull-on-demand cross-Gin synthesis at the start of a session — overnight commits, open zettels (especially open-to-empty / decisions-pending), Sentry deltas, Linear changes, active sub-Gin state. The cadence is the load-bearing piece, not the artifact (per war research C5 + DL1 lean B). Triggered by phrases like "morning brief", "what happened overnight", "catch me up", "/morning-brief", or by your own judgment when the live user is opening a fresh session and the substrate has moved.

Morning Brief

Pull-on-demand session-start synthesis. Battle rhythm at our scale, kept light: no enforced cadence, no hook-driven alarm, just an artifact the live user reaches for when they open a session and want to know what moved while they were away.

Why

The war research (usegin/research/war-management/SYNTHESIS.md C5 + DL1) converges on three independent findings: PO"SH says we lack a battle rhythm; Modern Application says McChrystal-style O&I is the load-bearing missing ritual; IAF tikkur says daily is non-negotiable. Mission Command warns the opposite — at our scale (1 human + N Gins), enforced cadence collapses into ceremony.

Synthesis: build the artifact, skip the cadence. Lihu pulls it on demand. If after 2 weeks of use it has compounded, upgrade to enforced cadence (Pitfall-2-aware); if not, kill it cleanly.

When to use

Lihu opens a session after >12h of asynchronous work (overnight, weekend, return from a different track).
Multiple sub-Gins have been running in parallel; Lihu wants the in-flight COP (per D3 — pull-on-demand, not default-on stream-watching).
Before a non-trivial decision, to ensure the substrate has been read.

Don't use for: micro-syncs ("what just happened in the last 5 min" — read the chat); deep retros (use session-retro); incident response (use tikur).

What it produces

A single markdown block, top-down read. Each section stays terse (laconic, principle z032) and points at deeper artifacts for "investigate without limit" (z018) when needed.

# Morning Brief — YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM

## Since last brief
- N commits to main (range <SHA>..<SHA>); the load-bearing 3 are <SHAs> for <reasons>.
- N pushes by other Gin sessions; conflict / collision count from `tikur-records/` since cutoff.
- N new zettels (z<N>..z<M>); the load-bearing 1–3 are <ids> for <reasons>.

## In flight
- Active sub-Gins: <IDs from agent-records>, charters at <paths>.
- Open-to-empty zettels created this window (need eyes from Lihu).
- Pending decisions in z020 shape (look for `dilemma` or `for you to weigh` markers).

## Friction window
- New tikur-records/ files since cutoff.
- New friction-zettels (anything tagged friction or with frustration_high).
- `dx his` aspects worth flagging from the cutoff window.

## External
- Sentry delta (top-3 issues by event-count or new-fingerprint since cutoff).
- Linear: status changes on issues Lihu is assigned to or watching.
- CI: red runs on main since cutoff.

## Suggested first move
One line. Per principle 6 (Lihu's attention is the COG), name the *one* thing whose absence Lihu would later regret. Not a list — the click.

Cadence

Pull-on-demand. No hook fires it. No daily alarm. Lihu reaches for it (or asks UseGin to). The discipline is in the use, not the trigger.

If after 2 weeks of organic use Lihu is reaching for it daily, then propose upgrading to a session-start hook (DL1 option C). Until then, ceremony risk > absence cost.

Implementation

Until dx morning-brief lands as a CLI primitive (slice for ENG follow-up), produce the brief by composing existing surfaces — UseGin runs the queries inline:

# Time cutoff = last brief, or 24h ago if no prior brief
SINCE="24 hours ago"

# Commits
git log --oneline --since="$SINCE" main

# Tikur records since cutoff
find .claude/tikur-records/ -newer-than 1d  # rough proxy

# Zettels since cutoff
ls -t usegin/zettel/zettels/ | head -20

# Sentry delta
sentry list-issues --since 1d --top 3   # via reference_sentry_cli

# Linear
plan list --assignee @me --since 1d
plan list --watching --since 1d

# CI red
gh run list --branch main --status failure --created ">$(date -d '24 hours ago' -Iseconds)"

The synthesis is the value-add — UseGin reads the raw data and produces the structured brief above. Don't dump raw command output; that's the failure mode (Pitfall 2 — ceremony without decision).

Pitfall guards

No decisions = no point. If three consecutive briefs land without a single "today we will X because of Y" delta, kill the skill. Pull-on-demand exists to surface deltas; without deltas, it's noise.
Don't dump raw output. Per laconic — investigate without limit, output the click. The raw git log belongs in evidence; the brief carries the meaning.
Don't tell Lihu what he already knows. If the answer is "you know all this already," say so and offer the suggested first move only.
No formatting fluff. No banners, no emojis, no "good morning". The brief is a tool, not a greeting.

Threading

↑z028 · ~principle 05 (#5 orient + #6 COG) · ~Gin.md (process over outcome) · ~`tikur skill · ~session-retro skill · ~use-gin` skill (capabilities handbook).

Source

War research SYNTHESIS C5 + DL1 (usegin/research/war-management/SYNTHESIS.md). Whiteboards from PO"SH (battle rhythm), Modern Application (McChrystal O&I), Mission Command (Pitfall 2), IAF tikkur (daily ritual).