Dev Sync Summary

Turn a raw Pony Development Sync meeting summary (for example, a Zoom AI recap) into a polished, fact-checked comment on the open "Last Week in Pony" issue.

Where this fits

This skill produces raw material, not a finished post. The comment it writes lands on the open "Last Week in Pony" issue, where the lwip skill later reads it (alongside the week's other comments) and weaves it into the blog post. Your job here is one comment: an accurate, readable recap of one Pony Development Sync. You are not writing the post.

Critical: never fabricate; interview for anything uncertain

This is the whole job. Get it wrong and you have poisoned the raw material that the post is built from.

Every factual claim in the comment must come from a verifiable source: the raw summary itself, a linked PR/issue/RFC confirmed with gh, git history, or the user. This applies to more than the obvious facts. It applies to PR and RFC numbers, to their titles, to the relationships between items ("fixes the same bug as", "the opposite of", "stacked on"), to who attended or said what (including who was driving the "Main Pony" host identity — see Inputs), and to every characterization — "intermittent", "crash", "long-standing", "minor", "affects everyone". Duration, severity, history, and impact are factual claims. If you cannot substantiate one, do not write it.

A raw meeting summary is often machine-generated and lossy. It will mangle identifiers ("Pony C" for ponyc), guess at titles, and state relationships nobody confirmed. Treat it as a set of leads to verify, not as copy to polish.

When the summary is ambiguous, when something will not verify, or when you feel yourself reaching for a plausible-sounding detail to smooth a gap: stop and ask the user. Multiple rounds of questions are expected, not a failure. Correctness beats getting a draft up fast. Turn it into an interview if you need to.

Never invent a type name. Never assert a relationship you have not read. Never guess a repository or a number. The numbered steps below place the stop-and-ask gates where they actually bite.

Inputs

You need three things from the user:

• the raw meeting summary,
• the meeting date (for the comment header and front matter elsewhere), and
• the recording URL.

If any are missing, ask before proceeding. If the recording is not posted yet, do not invent or guess a URL — ask whether to wait for it, omit the Recording: line, or use a placeholder the user gives you.

Always ask who hosted as "Main Pony." "Main Pony" (often just "Main") is the shared host identity for the sync — usually Joe, but sometimes Sean or someone else. It is a role, not a fixed person, so never assume who it was, and never render the literal "Main Pony" as if it were a name. Ask every time. You only need their real name in the comment when you attribute something specific that Main said or did, but ask up front so the name is on hand and you never guess.

Voice and format

Write in the team's collective voice — "we" — in Sean's prose style: flowing narrative, varied sentence length, opinions stated plainly, no AI tells. It is a recap of a group meeting, so "we" is the subject. Do not write it in the first person "I"; that voice belongs to the finished post, which lwip frames itself.

For the voice, follow the inline guidance above. From this project's AGENTS.md, take only two things: the tone notes (Hemingway-esque, conversational, not clipped) and the owner/repo reference convention. Ignore the blog-post format in AGENTS.md (front matter, ## Items of Note, footer) — that is for the published post, not for a comment. AGENTS.md is already in context via the project CLAUDE.md, so reference it; do not copy it in.

No feature checklists. No choppy sequences of disconnected facts. If a paragraph would lose nothing as a bullet list, rewrite it.

Citing PRs, issues, and RFCs

Cite every PR, issue, and RFC as owner/repo NNNN, rendered as a markdown link to its canonical URL — for example, [ponylang/ponyc 5431](https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/pull/5431). No bare "PR 5431"; no one owns a number any more than they own a name.

Always resolve the real title with gh. Never trust the number-to-title mapping in the raw summary. RFCs live in ponylang/rfcs and may be issues or pull requests — check which before you link. (In the worked example below, "RFC 232" was issue #232, not a PR.)

Steps

1. Gather inputs. Confirm you have the summary, the date, and the recording URL, and ask who hosted as "Main Pony" this meeting (see Inputs). Ask for anything missing.

2. Extract and verify every reference. Pull every PR/issue/RFC number out of the summary. For each, confirm it with gh:

   • gh pr view N --repo ponylang/ponyc --json title,url
   • gh issue view N --repo OWNER/REPO --json title,url

   Capture the real title and canonical URL from gh, not from the summary. Stop gate: if a number does not resolve — wrong repo, typo, transposed digits — do not guess the repo or change the number. Ask the user.

3. Verify every claimed relationship. Wherever the summary (or your draft) says two items relate — a contrast, a cause, "fixes the same bug", "the opposite symptom", "stacked on" — read the PR bodies (and the diffs if you need them) and confirm the claim holds. Fix it, drop it, or ask. Do not ship a relationship you inferred from titles alone.

4. Verify characterizations. For every "intermittent", "crash", "long-standing", "minor", "affects everyone", and the like, confirm it against the PR/issue or ask. Drop what you cannot substantiate.

5. Write the narrative. Team "we", Sean's prose style. Open with a sentence that frames the shape of the sync, then walk the items with connective tissue between them. Cite each reference as owner/repo NNNN linked to its URL. When you attribute something to "Main", use the real name from step 1, never "Main Pony" or "Main".

6. Find the open issue. Run:

   gh issue list --repo ponylang/ponylang-website --label last-week-in-pony --state open
   

   Stop gate: if this returns zero issues or more than one, do not pick one. Ask the user which issue to use (or to open one).

7. Guard against duplicates. Read the open issue's comments (gh issue view N --repo ponylang/ponylang-website --json comments). If one already begins with {Month Day, Year} Pony Development Sync. for this date, stop and ask before adding a second — this skill always creates a new comment, so a re-run would otherwise duplicate.

8. Pre-post checks. Before posting:

   • Fabrication audit. Re-read the draft. Every number, title, link, relationship, and characterization must trace to a source you verified this session. Anything that does not — verify it or cut it.
   • Voice self-review. One anti-pattern at a time: anthropomorphizing, unclear antecedents, AI tells, inflated claims, choppy fact sequences.

9. Post the comment. Write the body to a temp file under ~/tmp (create the directory first with mkdir -p ~/tmp if it is missing) and post a new comment:

   gh issue comment N --repo ponylang/ponylang-website --body-file ~/tmp/dev-sync-comment.md
   

   Use the format:

   {Month Day, Year} Pony Development Sync.
   
   Recording: {url}
   
   {narrative}
   

   Report the comment URL to the user, then delete the temp file.

What good looks like

A real run, from the June 10, 2026 sync.

The raw input was a Zoom recap — lossy and not to be trusted as copy:

The meeting focused on reviewing several pull requests and RFCs related to Pony programming language development. Sean presented PR 5431, which proposes splitting one pointer type into two distinct types [...] They also reviewed PR 5420 fixing intermittent crashes during multi-threaded compilation, PR 5423 rejecting self-referential if-type constraints in lambdas and object literals, and PR 5443 fixing incorrect rejection and crashes for if-type conditions inside lambdas. The conversation ended with a brief discussion of RFC 232 regarding allowing optimization options when using Pony C [...]

The posted comment, after verification:

June 10, 2026 Pony Development Sync.

Recording: https://vimeo.com/1200285225

This week's sync was mostly a pass through the review queue, with one larger design conversation up front.

That design conversation was ponylang/ponyc 5431, which splits our single pointer type in two. [...] Pointer keeps the memory Pony owns and manages. UnsafePointer takes the foreign memory crossing the FFI boundary. [...]

From there it was the queue. ponylang/ponyc 5420 fixes the intermittent crashes we'd been hitting when compiling on multiple threads at once. The next two land on opposite sides of the same corner of the language. ponylang/ponyc 5423 starts rejecting self-referential iftype constraints inside lambdas and object literals [...]. ponylang/ponyc 5443 goes the other way [...].

Last on the agenda was ponylang/rfcs 232, about allowing optimization options when using ponyc. [...]

What the verification changed, and why each step exists:

• "Pony C" became ponyc — the recap mangled the identifier. Step 2.
• Every PR title came from gh, not the recap. The recap's "fixing incorrect rejection and crashes for if-type conditions inside lambdas" was missing "and object literals", which ponylang/ponyc 5443's real title includes. Step 2.
• "RFC 232" was an issue, not a PR — ponylang/rfcs 232 links to /issues/232. Guessing /pull/232 would have 404'd. Step 2.
• The 5423/5443 "contrast" was confirmed by reading both PRs, not inferred from titles: one tightens (rejects what was wrongly accepted), the other loosens (accepts what was wrongly rejected), and 5443 is stacked on 5423. Step 3.
• iftype is the real keyword, not "if-type". Voice/accuracy.