Elenchus Study

Elenchus — study front end

The research/study front end over the elenchus-council engine. The engine owns the loop (parallel anonymized seats → user responds → stress-test → dissent-preserving synthesis → gate, no readiness verdict). This skill does not re-implement that — read elenchus-council/SKILL.md and run its loop. This file supplies only the study-mode specifics: triggers, topic shaping, round templates, the checkpoint files, and the terminal.

Convening the council is the first move, not a formality. Do not answer the topic yourself with a tidy reading list — that single-model summary is the exact sycophancy this replaces. The council gathers a spread of valid links; the chairman then organizes them into categories and proposes a phased study roadmap (Phase A/B/C…), which the user revises before anything is saved. The roadmap is a proposal the user shapes — not a verdict the model hands down.

The inverted loop (read this first — it differs from build mode)

Build mode starts from a premise. Study mode starts from a topic with no premise yet — so Round 1 gathers resources, before the user has anything to defend. Default 3 rounds + optional further rounds:

R1  RESOURCE GATHERING — user names a topic (+ constraints). Seats gather a
    grounded spread of VALID LINKS only (each tagged with the sub-area it covers).
    Chairman DEDUPS, writes the resources file, then ORGANIZES the links into
    categories and PROPOSES a phased study roadmap (Phase A/B/C…). The user REVISES
    it in-chat; only on approval is the study-plan file saved. Then the user goes
    away and actually studies. (No premise yet; no questions yet.)
      ▼  (user studies, then re-invokes)
R2  GROUNDING — the user returns with their own premise / summary of what they
    learned. Seats ask biting Socratic questions about THAT understanding.
      ▼  (user answers)
R3  CHALLENGE & REFINE — seats stress-test the refined understanding; where
    credible sources disagree, BOTH positions are preserved (never collapsed).
      ▼
    Optional further rounds at the user's discretion.

The engine's "user responds between rounds" step is, in R1→R2, the user going off to study and returning with a summary — not answering questions in-thread.

Scope

• In: researching/learning a topic the user is not yet opinionated about — building a grounded reading/resource list, then stress-testing the understanding they build from it.
• Out: a build/architecture premise the user already intends to construct (hand to elenchus-build); and a one-shot factual lookup ("what's the syntax for X?") — a single search answers that, no council needed.

Topic shaping (what to elicit before Round 1)

The seats gather better with constraints. Draw out, briefly:

1. The topic, in the user's words ("software architecture fundamentals").
2. Depth & goal — a broad survey, or deep mastery? For a job, a specific build, or curiosity? (Shapes how advanced the resources should be.)
3. What they already half-know — so the seats don't gather the trivial intro.
4. Resource-type preferences — books / repos / tools / frameworks / courses / papers / docs — and constraints (language, free-only, recency, time budget).

Pass this to the engine as the round-1 brief. Don't pre-curate the list yourself.

Round templates (study mode)

The engine composes each seat's prompt from seat-base + a round template this skill owns + the tier adapter (see elenchus-council → Templates & composition). Study mode supplies three:

• Round 1 — templates/round-1-resources.md. Seats gather a grounded spread of real, current valid links only — each tagged with the sub-area it covers:, and spanning the topic's sub-areas for depth. Schema: RESOURCES (title/url/type/covers/why) / THIN SUB-AREAS. Seats ground every URL (Context7/web) and do NOT categorize, order, or plan — that is the chairman's job, after the seats return (see Round 1 roadmap, below).
• Round 2 — templates/round-2-grounding.md. The user returns with a summary of what they learned; seats probe it. Schema: QUESTIONS / SHAKY CLAIMS / GO DEEPER.
• Round 3 — templates/round-3-challenge.md. Stress-test the refined understanding. Schema: HOLDS UP / DOESN'T HOLD / CONTESTED / STILL OPEN — the CONTESTED bucket carries genuine expert disagreement, both sides preserved.

Round 1 roadmap (the chairman's job, after the seats return)

The seats hand back valid links only. The chairman then, in-chat, before saving any study-plan file:

1. Dedup the merged links (inline — see below).
2. Organize them into categories, driven by the seats' covers: tags (one category per sub-area, roughly), and surface the THIN SUB-AREAS honestly.
3. Propose a phased study roadmap to the user: Phase A, Phase B, Phase C… — neutral letter labels, presented in letter order, with the phase contents arranged in a sensible learning sequence (foundations before advanced). Each phase draws on the categories/links above. The letters are labels, not a quality ranking.
4. Revise with the user until they explicitly approve. Present the roadmap, take their edits, re-present — loop as many times as they want. Do not write the study-plan file before approval.
5. Only on approval, save docs/elenchus/<topic-slug>-study-plan.md.

This is study mode's one deliberate relaxation of the engine's no-ranking stance: the chairman may sequence a learning path here — because it is a proposal the user shapes, not a verdict imposed. (The terminal "you've learned it" verdict is still never the council's to give.)

The checkpoint files (durable state)

Three files per topic, under docs/elenchus/.

Gitignore docs/elenchus/ first. These files are private session scratch, not artifacts to commit. Before writing the first one, ensure the caller project's .gitignore contains a docs/elenchus/ line — append it if missing (create .gitignore if there is none). Do this once per session; don't duplicate the line.

• <topic-slug>.md — the session checkpoint (frontmatter + body). Survives a /clear. Write it DURING the round, before the user clears — never a SessionEnd hook.
• <topic-slug>-resources.md — the deduped link list from Round 1 (raw, with covers: tags). Written during the round for durability.
• <topic-slug>-study-plan.md — the approved phased roadmap (Phase A/B/C…). Written only after the user approves it (see Round 1 roadmap). This is the thing the user actually takes away to study.

Durability split: the checkpoint and the raw -resources.md carry no recommendation, so they persist during the round (don't lose the seats' work on a /clear). The -study-plan.md is the one artifact gated on user approval — never write it before the user has signed off on the roadmap.

Dedup is the chairman's job, inline: merge the seats' lists, drop duplicate URLs (normalize http/https, www., trailing slash), keep the better one-line why when two seats found the same thing. No hook — if inline dedup ever visibly fails at scale, revisit then.

Resume = scan-on-invoke. When convened, Read docs/elenchus/ for an open session (ready: false) matching the topic. If found, resume from its round. Within Round 1, the presence of <topic-slug>-study-plan.md marks the roadmap as approved: if it's missing but -resources.md exists, resume by re-proposing the roadmap from the saved links (don't re-dispatch the seats). If no session, start Round 1.

Checkpoint frontmatter:

---
artifact: elenchus-study-session
topic: "<one-line topic>"
ready: false          # the USER self-declares this true; the council never sets it
round: 1              # 1 = resources gathered + roadmap proposed/approved · 2 = grounding posed · 3 = challenged
seats: [fable, opus, sonnet, haiku]
resource_types: [...] # preferences elicited in topic shaping
open_questions: [...] # grounding questions unanswered / returned "I don't know"
study_path: [...]     # what to keep studying for any gap / "I don't know"
created: <date>
updated: <date>
---

Body: the topic + constraints; (R1) pointers to the resources file and the approved study-plan file; (R2) the user's summary, the anonymized grounding questions by category, the user's answers; (R3) held / didn't hold / contested (both sides) / still open; the study path.

Terminal

• Success exit = the user self-declares they understand enough. There is no "you've learned it" verdict — that's the user's call. If they now want to build with the grounded understanding, hand to elenchus-build; otherwise close with the consolidated study path. Set ready: true only because the user declared it.
• Open questions / an "I don't know" → honest stop. Present the ordered study path (grounded in current docs), keep the checkpoint open, invite re-entry after more study. An "I don't know" is a learning point, not a failure.

Common mistakes (study front end)

• Running Round 1 as questions (build's flow) instead of resource gathering. Study has no premise yet in R1 — there is nothing to ask questions about.
• Seats inventing URLs. A made-up link is worse than none. Seats ground every URL; an unverifiable one is marked unverified, never fabricated.
• Seats categorizing, ordering, or proposing a plan. In Round 1 seats gather valid links only (each tagged covers:); organizing them into categories and sequencing the phased roadmap is the chairman's job, after the seats return.
• Saving the study-plan file before the user approves it. The chairman proposes the roadmap in-chat and iterates until the user explicitly approves; only then is <topic-slug>-study-plan.md written. (The checkpoint and raw -resources.md may be written during the round — they carry no recommendation.)
• Phases ordered by "quality" or labeled "start here." Phases use neutral letter labels (A/B/C…); the contents follow a learning sequence, but the labels never imply one resource is the best.
• Collapsing CONTESTED in R3 into one tidy answer. Where sources genuinely disagree, show both and the condition under which each holds.
• Writing state only at the end (lose it on /clear) instead of during the round.