3-osp-historian

/3-osp-historian — Sub-Domain Historian

Compresses the retrieved literature into a chronological narrative that mimics a senior researcher's mental model of the sub-domain.

Activation

Invoke the osp-historian-agent skill.

Inputs — none of these is a gate

• phases.literature.status == "completed" and 02_retrieved_literature.md exists. Without it you have no retrieved corpus, so the narrative rests on your own knowledge alone — which has a cutoff and will miss recent work. Build it anyway, mark the phase's own limits in Provenance, and say plainly in the narrative that no literature was retrieved. Recommend /2-osp-literature once.

Record any skip before you start. The orchestrator is not in the loop when the user runs this command directly, so it falls to you: for every earlier phase still pending, set phases.<name>.status = "skipped" and phases.<name>.skip_reason to their reason, or "user ran /3-osp-historian first". A phase left pending reads as "not reached yet", and the final review cannot tell the difference.

Opening block (print before step 1)

Render the opening block exactly as .agents/defaults/phase_block_template.md defines it — that file holds the rail, the rules and the widths, and it is the only place they are written down. This is phase 4 of 7 (historian); read the rail's state from session.json. Values:

  DOING    build the sub-field's chronological narrative
  READS    .brain/raw/01_structured_summary.md
           .brain/raw/02_retrieved_literature.md
  WRITES   .brain/raw/03_domain_narrative.md
  COST     ~2 min, no external calls

Steps

1. Read .brain/session.json, .brain/raw/01_structured_summary.md, .brain/raw/02_retrieved_literature.md.
2. Activate the osp-historian-agent skill.
3. The skill builds a chronological narrative grouped by inflection points (eras), each characterized by its dominant approach and what triggered the transition out.
4. The skill places the paper under review in the narrative — same era it claims, or a different one — and identifies its closest precedents.
5. Write .brain/raw/03_domain_narrative.md.
6. Update session.json:
   • phases.historian.status = "completed"
   • phases.historian.completed_at = <now>
   • phases.historian.notes = "<N> eras identified; paper placed in era <N>"
   • resume_from = "baseline_scout"