Gabe Pulse

Gabe Pulse — is anything important owed?

Usage: /gabe-pulse [brief | --json | --since <ref>]

Gabe execution contract (E1–E7)

This skill runs under the suite execution contract — E1 EVIDENCE · E2 RUN-BEFORE-✅ · E3 NO SILENT DOWNGRADE · E4 REUSE FIRST · E5 STATE SYNC · E6 MISSING ANCHOR = STOP · E7 REPORT WHERE — floors, not ceilings; a skill's own gate may be stricter, never looser. Full text: ../gabe-docs/references/execution-contract.md (if that file is missing, E6 applies — STOP).

What this does

A satellite, not a beat. /gabe-next answers "what is the one next step?" from PLAN cells. Pulse answers the broader question you ask after a long stretch of work: "is anything important owed anywhere?" — including the things no beat is currently watching.

It reads ten deterministic signals, sorts them into four bands, and prints a ranked report. It writes nothing, dispatches nothing, and runs no tests. Every row names the command that clears it; you decide whether to run it.

Its reason for existing is the measured one: across 70 sessions on five repos, 20% ran no lifecycle beat at all, and 113 files changed in sessions that produced no commit and no record. Pulse is the manual check that makes that visible before it compounds.

Procedure

1. Read references/pulse-spec.md IN FULL before executing — it is the binding spec: the ten signals, their exact sources, the band ranking, the cap rule, and the degradation table. If it is missing, E6 applies — STOP.
2. Parse $ARGUMENTS: brief (headline only), --json (machine output), --since <ref> (passed through to the ledger-gap detector), --bookkeeping <prefix> (repeatable).
3. Establish the gate (spec §1). A .kdbp/ project reads all ten signals; a repo without one reads the subset that git and the tree can answer, and enumerates the rest as unavailable with a reason — never silently.
4. Collect the signals (spec §2). Each is deterministic; none costs an LLM call. A signal that errors is reported as undetermined with its reason, never as clean (E3).
5. Rank into bands and apply the cap (spec §3). Print the report (spec §4).

The four bands

Ranked by what their absence costs, worst first.

EVIDENCE leads because it is the only band where the record itself is missing — every other band describes work the project can still see.

Signal sources

All deterministic. No signal is inferred from prose or from a session transcript.

P4/P5 defer to next.mjs rather than re-deriving the routing decision. Two readers of PLAN cells that disagree is a second source of truth; pulse reports what the router says, verbatim.

Output contract (summary)

Opens with one line naming the single most important owed thing, or nothing owed. Then the banded table, worst band first, each row carrying its evidence and its clearing command. Closes with the signal roster: how many signals ran, how many were unavailable, and why each one was — an unavailable signal is a stated fact, never an omission (E3).

Caps at 5 rows per band. A truncated band prints … N more — never a silent cap. brief prints only the headline and the roster count. Full contract in the spec; it is binding.

Non-goals

• Does not write any file — no LEDGER row, no PENDING row, no PLAN tick. Pulse is read-only.
• Does not dispatch commands. It names them; you run them. (/gabe-next is the dispatcher.)
• Does not run tests, builds, or linters — no side effects, no wall-clock surprises.
• Does not judge code quality, coupling, or churn — that is /gabe-review and /gabe-health.
• Does not re-derive the routing decision — next.mjs owns it.
• Does not classify your work into categories. The record showed the useful split is recorded vs unrecorded, and P1/P2 already separate those without asking you to label anything.

Example

$ /gabe-pulse
PULSE — gustify · 2026-07-26

▶ Most important: 73 commits carry no LEDGER row (evidence gap since 17a4056)

EVIDENCE
  P1  73 unregistered commits · 74 bookkeeping excluded    → /gabe-commit
  P2  30 uncommitted paths                                 → /gabe-commit
LIFECYCLE
  P4  router says: /gabe-review (Phase 41 — Exec ✅, Review ⬜)
  P6  3 phases shipped, not covered in the center          → /gabe-cc-update 38,39,41
SHIP
  P3  clean — nothing unpushed
AGING
  P8  2 PENDING rows at Times Deferred ≥ 3                 → /gabe-review deferred

signals: 8 ran · 2 unavailable (P9 no walks.jsonl · P10 no size-budget script on PATH)

The fence shows the STRUCTURE. In the real response the rows that name a file are emitted as markdown, not fenced, so the paths click through (findings contract — a fenced link is inert):

• P1 73 unregistered commits since 17a4056 → .kdbp/LEDGER.md · /gabe-commit
• P8 2 PENDING rows at ≥3 deferrals → .kdbp/PENDING.md · /gabe-review deferred
• P10 breaches → each over-budget file linked (from size-budget.sh) · advisory

Count-only rows (P2 uncommitted, P4/P6 phase ids) stay plain — no single file to link.

$ARGUMENTS

The ANGLE family (1.1.0)

scripts/angles.py computes ten evidence-backed triggers — adversarial pass owed (S1), structural scan overdue (S2), journey proof missing (S3), published docs stale (S4), scope drift (S5), entity context worth loading (S6), an explanation worth drawing (S7), workflow-census capture debt (S8), entity-shape drift (S9), and a diff-added fetch that named no declared endpoint (S10) — each naming the satellite that would find it now, or reporting unavailable with what would unlock it. Spine beats print its --one-line output verbatim; it emits at most one row and nothing when nothing fires.

python3 skills/gabe-pulse/scripts/angles.py . --why      # every signal, including why one is quiet
python3 skills/gabe-pulse/scripts/angles.py . --one-line # what a beat prints
python3 skills/gabe-pulse/scripts/angles.py . --json     # machine output

Full contract in references/pulse-spec.md §5, including the decay rule and this mechanism's own kill condition. Battery: tests/pulse-angles/run.sh — 33 cases, every live signal proven to FIRE and stay SILENT, plus the cap, the silence, and the decay.