sensemakinglisted

Distill raw notes, multiple markdown drafts, research packs, and evolving reports into one coherent canonical source document before producing polished outputs. Use whenever the user says things like "make sense of these notes", "I have several drafts", "turn this into one coherent story", "extract the thesis", "help me refine my thinking", "what's the common ground", or points at topic folders containing rough thoughts, evidence, prior reports, or competing markdown iterations. Also use when the user needs to separate evidence from interpretation, identify missing proof, or build a richer source document for later articles, decks, design docs, or executive summaries. Do NOT use for greenfield solution design with little or no source material (use brainstorming), for a proposal that is already decided and just needs a peer-review write-up, or for distilling a conversation into memory records.
petermcalister/shared-skills · ★ 2 · Data & Documents · score 68

Install: claude install-skill petermcalister/shared-skills

# Sensemaking — Raw Material Into Canonical Source Use this skill when the user is not starting from a blank page. The job is to turn messy source material into a trustworthy source of truth. This repo repeatedly follows the same pattern: - raw thought capture - critique and gap finding - discovery or evidence gathering - one rich canonical source document - audience-specific compressed outputs - session handoff This skill owns that middle stretch. ## Core Principle Do not compress too early. If the user's materials include raw notes, evidence, and already-compressed outputs, treat the compressed outputs as clues about audience and framing, not as the canonical source of truth. Build or repair the rich source document first, then derive downstream artifacts from it. ## When This Skill Applies vs Neighboring Skills - **Sensemaking**: "I have notes, drafts, reports, and evidence. Help me work out what this really says and what is missing." - **Brainstorming**: "I have a problem or feature idea, but I am still exploring possible solutions." - **Peer-review write-up**: "I already have the proposal. Help me write it up cleanly for review." - **Audience packaging**: "Take the already-stable source document and package it for an audience." If the user's material is still too under-formed to extract a thesis, stay in sensemaking. If the thesis becomes stable and the user now needs option exploration for an implementation path, hand off to brainstorming. If the user a