Community Survey

Community Survey Skill

Surveys informal and industry sources for a given topic — covering Hacker News, engineering blogs, ProductHunt, Medium, Substack, X (indirect), and Quora. Complements literature-survey (which targets academic papers) with community signal, practitioner discourse, and tooling trends.

Inputs

• topic (required): natural language topic to survey
• topic_slug (optional): snake_case slug for file naming; derived from topic if omitted
• time_window (optional): recency filter, default "last 30 days". Pass "last 7 days", "last 3 months", etc.
• delta (optional): if true, load the most recent prior survey for this slug and report only new signal
• lens (optional): one-sentence framing for what angle this run cares about (e.g. "evaluating tools to adopt for production"). If not provided, falls back to the ## Lens section in <topic_slug>/README.md. The lens shapes the synthesis section (Step 8) — it is woven into the Key Themes, Notable Tools, and Key Debates summaries.

Output location

Resolve the paper reading repo path via the fetch-repo-path skill (reads /path/to/works/for/you/knowledge_base/context/registry/repos.md → "Paper Reading Repo" entry). Do not hardcode the path. Then write to:

<paper-reading-repo>/community-survey/<topic_slug>/community_survey_YYYYMMDD.md

If the community-survey/<topic_slug>/ folder doesn't exist, create it.

Per-topic folder layout

Each topic gets its own folder under community-survey/. The canonical layout is:

<paper-reading-repo>/community-survey/<topic_slug>/
├── README.md                            ← persistent context for this topic (lens, audience, why tracked)
├── log.md                               ← append-only run journal
├── community_survey_YYYYMMDD.md         ← per-run snapshot
└── community_survey_YYYYMMDD.md

• README.md is written once on the first run for a topic and read on every subsequent run to recover the lens.
• log.md is append-only (newest entry on top) and gives a quick chronological view of all runs for this topic.
• community_survey_YYYYMMDD.md is the full per-run snapshot.

Steps

1. Parse inputs

• Derive topic_slug: lowercase, spaces → underscores, strip punctuation
• Resolve today's date (YYYYMMDD) from currentDate
• Set time_window default to "last 30 days" if not provided
• If delta=true, read the most recent community_survey_*.md in the output folder and note its date as prior_date
• If lens parameter not provided, read <topic_slug>/README.md and extract the ## Lens section content as the active lens for this run

1.5. Ensure README.md exists

• If <topic_slug>/README.md does not exist (first run on this topic):
  • Prompt the user for:
    • (a) why this topic is being tracked
    • (b) audience / who consumes the survey
    • (c) lens — one sentence describing the angle the survey should take (e.g. "evaluating tools to adopt", "tracking competitor moves", "mapping live debates")
  • Write the README.md with these three sections plus a ## Created date line, using this template:

# Community Survey Topic — <Topic>

**Created:** YYYY-MM-DD

## Why tracked
[user's answer to (a)]

## Audience
[user's answer to (b)]

## Lens
[user's one-sentence answer to (c) — this shapes synthesis framing]

• If README.md already exists: read it and extract the lens for use in Step 8 (synthesis)

2. Search Tier 1 — Hacker News

Run two searches:

site:news.ycombinator.com <topic> <time_window>
site:news.ycombinator.com <topic> Show HN OR Ask HN

Fetch the top 2 HN threads using WebFetch. Extract: post title, score (if visible), key comment themes, and notable disagreements.

3. Search Tier 1 — Engineering Blogs

Coverage is split into three category-grouped queries to avoid query-length limits and result dilution.

3a. Big Tech research blogs

<topic> site:research.google OR site:ai.googleblog.com OR site:deepmind.google OR site:research.facebook.com OR site:microsoft.com/en-us/research OR site:apple.com/research OR site:machinelearning.apple.com OR site:amazon.science OR site:openai.com/research OR site:anthropic.com/research <time_window>

Fetch top 2 results.

3b. Big Tech engineering blogs (Western + Asian)

<topic> site:engineering.fb.com OR site:netflixtechblog.com OR site:eng.uber.com OR site:engineering.linkedin.com OR site:eng.snap.com OR site:research.bytedance.com OR site:engineering.atspotify.com OR site:doordash.engineering OR site:eng.lyft.com OR site:medium.com/airbnb-engineering OR site:medium.com/pinterest-engineering OR site:medium.com/twitter-engineering OR site:shopify.engineering OR site:stripe.com/blog/engineering <time_window>

Fetch top 2 results.

<topic> site:d2.naver.com OR site:tech.kakao.com OR site:engineering.linecorp.com OR site:medium.com/coupang-engineering <time_window>

Fetch top 1 result.

3c. ML/AI specialized blogs

<topic> site:huggingface.co/blog OR site:wandb.ai/fully-connected <time_window>

Fetch top 1 result.

For each fetched result across 3a–3c, summarize: which company, what they published, key technical claims.

4. Search Tier 1 — ProductHunt

site:producthunt.com <topic> <time_window>

Extract: top-launched products, upvote signals, taglines, and any notable discussion in comments.

5. Search Tier 1 — Medium & Substack

<topic> site:medium.com OR site:substack.com <time_window>

Fetch top 2 articles. Extract: author's thesis, key takeaways, community reaction if visible.

6. Search Tier 2 — X / Twitter (indirect)

Run general search to surface X posts and secondary coverage:

<topic> twitter OR "x.com" discussion <time_window>

Also run:

<topic> site:x.com <time_window>

Do NOT attempt to fetch x.com URLs directly — they will fail. Extract tweet summaries and quote snippets from search result previews and secondary coverage articles only.

7. Search Tier 2 — Quora

site:quora.com <topic>

Surface top question URLs. Fetch the top 1 result. Extract: question framing, top answer summary.

8. Synthesize

Produce a structured synthesis across all sources.

All four synthesis subsections (Key Themes, Notable Tools & Projects, Key Debates & Disagreements, Emerging Patterns) must be written through the lens stated in README.md / passed via the lens parameter. Do not produce generic summaries — concentrate on signal that matters to the lens.

# Community Survey: <Topic>

**Date:** YYYY-MM-DD
**Time window:** <time_window>
**Mode:** full | delta (since YYYY-MM-DD)
**Lens:** <lens text>

## Source Snapshots

### Hacker News
[findings]

### Big Tech Research Blogs
[findings]

### Big Tech Engineering Blogs
[findings]

### ML/AI Specialized Blogs
[findings]

### ProductHunt
[findings]

### Medium / Substack
[findings]

### X / Twitter (indirect)
[findings — note these are snippets from search previews, not direct fetches]

### Quora
[findings]

## Synthesis

### Key Themes
### Notable Tools & Projects
### Key Debates & Disagreements
### Emerging Patterns
### Open Questions

## Limitations This Run
- Reddit: blocked at crawler level (Anthropic user-agent denied). Not included.
- X/Twitter: direct fetch unavailable; coverage is indirect via search snippets and secondary articles.
- Time window is approximate — search engine indexing lag may affect recency.

9. Delta section (if delta=true)

Append a ## What's New Since <prior_date> section comparing to the prior survey. Focus on:

• New tools or projects not mentioned before
• Shifted sentiment or consensus
• New debates that emerged
• Topics that went quiet

10. Save output

Write the file to:

<paper-reading-repo>/community-survey/<topic_slug>/community_survey_YYYYMMDD.md

(<paper-reading-repo> was already resolved at the start of the run via fetch-repo-path.)

Report the saved path to the user.

11. Append to log.md

• If <topic_slug>/log.md does not exist, create it with header # Log — <Topic>\n
• Prepend (newest on top) a new dated entry below the header:

## YYYY-MM-DD — community-survey run (<mode: full | delta since YYYY-MM-DD>)
- Lens: <lens used this run>
- Time window: <time_window>
- Sources scanned: HN(N), eng-blogs(N), PH(N), Medium(N), X(snippets), Quora(N)
- Output: community_survey_YYYYMMDD.md
- Notable: <one-line headline of the most significant finding this run>

Source Tier Reference

Known Limitations

• Reddit not included. Future: add OAuth credentials (REDDIT_CLIENT_ID, REDDIT_CLIENT_SECRET) as env vars to unlock via API.
• X/Twitter direct access not available. Future: add X Bearer Token (X_BEARER_TOKEN) for API v2 search (Basic tier, ~$100/mo).
• Engineering blog coverage depends on search indexing; very recent posts (< 48h) may not appear.