Digest

Digest Pattern

Generate concise "what happened" summaries for Forge activity. Digests focus on semantic changes — decisions, phase transitions, new work, direction shifts — not raw commit counts or file diffs.

When to Use

• User asks "what happened" / "catch me up" / "summary"
• Agent needs to contextualize recent activity
• Any context where recent Forge changes matter

Duration Resolution

Parse the user's duration into a git --since value:

Scope Definitions

Scope: efforts

Signal to extract (priority order):

1. New efforts initialized in period
2. Decisions — new ADR entries in decisions.md
3. Story refinement — stories moving to ready/in-slice
4. Slice candidates — new candidates accepted/spawned
5. Scope changes — in/out boundaries shifting

Git filter: -- .forge-context/efforts/

Scope: slices

Signal to extract (priority order):

1. Phase transitions — requirements → design → implementation → complete
2. Decisions — new ADR entries in decisions.md
3. Architecture/direction changes — design.md changes that alter approach, not just fill in details
4. Completion — slices marked done
5. New slices spawned in period

Git filter: -- .forge-context/slices/

Scope: forge

Signal to extract:

1. New/changed agents or commands — capability shifts
2. Guideline changes — engineering standard updates
3. Context updates — domain knowledge changes
4. New skills added

Scope: all

Combine all three scopes above. This is the default when no scope is specified.

Significance Filtering

Not everything that changed is worth reporting. Apply these rules to separate signal from noise:

Always significant:

• Decisions (ADRs) — any new entry in decisions.md
• Phase transitions — checklist phase completions
• New work items — new efforts or slices initialized
• Completions — work marked done

Significant if substantive:

• Content changes — only when they alter direction, scope, or architecture (not typo fixes or formatting)
• Design updates — approach changes, not detail fill-ins

Usually noise (skip unless meaningful):

• fix(audit) — automated audit fixes
• chore( — routine maintenance
• Formatting-only changes
• Index/README auto-updates

Output Format

# Digest: {Scope} | {Duration Label}

**Period:** YYYY-MM-DD to YYYY-MM-DD

## Key Highlights

- {1-2 sentence executive summary, most important items only}

## Efforts

### New
- **Name** — problem statement (few words)

### Decisions
- **Effort Name** — ADR-N: Title

### Candidate Movement
- **Effort Name** — N accepted, M spawned

## Slices

### Phase Transitions
- **Slice Name**: Phase A -> Phase B
- **Slice Name**: Completed (date)

### Decisions & Direction Changes
- **Slice Name** — ADR-N: Title
- **Slice Name** — what changed (few words)

### New Slices
- **Slice Name** from Effort Name — scope (few words)

## Forge Infrastructure
- Brief bullets of meaningful changes only

## Dig Deeper

- [Description](path/to/file.md)

Output Rules

• Maximize scannability, minimize reading time. Each item states what happened in the fewest words possible. No rationale, no justification, no "because" clauses.
• Skip empty sections entirely — no "None" placeholders
• One line per item maximum in the digest body
• Bold item names for scannability
• No commit hashes or counts — focus on meaning
• Past tense — report what happened, not what is happening
• Use em dashes (—) not hyphens for separators in item descriptions
• Dig Deeper links must be full paths or GitHub URLs that readers can navigate to — digests are often read outside Claude where relative paths don't resolve
• Digests are ephemeral — present directly, do not write to artifact files
• Forge signature — append the standard project SHA signature at the end of every digest using Skill: forge-signature