Pr1m4lc0d3 scout-recon
Find the truth by looking. Recon is how you find the ground worth taking: the pain in people's own words, and the rooms where those people already are.
1. Their words, not yours
The pain goes into .monkeys/recon.md in the phrasing the audience actually used — not translated into your product's vocabulary, not cleaned up, not made to sound like a value proposition. The words they use are the words that will reach them. If they said "I keep losing track of who I already emailed," write that. Don't write "poor contact management" over it — that's a category, not a pain, and nobody searches or vents in categories.
A pain you paraphrased is a pain you invented. Quote, don't summarise. If you only have a summary, go back and find the actual sentence, or mark it unverified until you do.
2. Walk the thread before you quote it
A quote captured from a reply is a quote captured from the tail of something. The reply matched your search; the post it answers is where the room actually is, and the gap between the two is routinely an order of magnitude and sometimes several.
Before a quote is recorded, three cheap moves:
- Go up to the root. Record it, and record which candidate led you there.
- Read the author's own replies. People qualify themselves in follow-ups. A quote used without them can present half a position as the whole of it.
- Read the top replies to the root. This is the densest source of pains and vocabulary available anywhere, and none of it has to be asked for.
This costs three page loads and it is the difference between capturing what one person said and capturing what a room thinks.
3. Two hard rules
recon.md is internal. Quotes captured there are research, never copy. Nothing in this file is republished as marketing. Never put a real person's words into public material, never attribute a phrase to a named individual anywhere a stranger can read it, and never present captured phrasing as a testimonial — it is not one, and dressing it as one does not make it one.
Record where a pain was heard, not who said it. The heard in: field takes a room, not a handle, not a username, not a real name, not a link to the individual post. You need the phrasing, not the person; the phrasing is the entire value of the capture, and the identity is the entire liability.
The reason is plain. Those people did not consent to being your marketing — they were describing a problem to their own community, not endorsing a product to yours. A testimonial you did not receive is a fabricated testimonial, however accurately you transcribed the sentence. And the person whose words you lifted is the one most able to say so in public, in the room where you took them, to the audience you were trying to reach.
4. Read the room before you enter it
A room is a forum, a subreddit, a newsletter's reply-all culture, a local meetup — anywhere with a name and a norm. Before treating a room as ground to stand on, record:
- who is actually there (not who you wish were there)
- what the room forbids — self-promotion bans, flair requirements, karma thresholds, a "no vendors" rule enforced by the mods
- what it costs to be welcome — days of participating before posting, a specific format, an introduction ritual
Skipping this step is how a raid becomes a ban. The rules and the entry cost are not friction to note in passing; they are the terrain, same as an incumbent's revenue model is terrain for raid-asymmetry.
5. Verify what you can, mark what you can't
Community sizes, member counts, and "most active" claims are usually third-party numbers, and they frequently contradict each other — a subreddit's sidebar, a directory listing, and the platform's own API can each report a different figure for the same room. Don't average them, don't pick the flattering one, and don't state one as fact from memory.
Every pain and every room gets a verified field:
verified: yes— you found the exact phrase or the room's activity at the source, this session.verified: no— the adopter told you, or you found a secondhand mention, but you have not confirmed it at the source.
An unverified entry still belongs in the file. Guessing at verification to make the pack look more solid is worse than an honest no — it hides exactly the thing a later skill needs to know before it builds a claim on top of it.
Some rooms sit behind a login wall, X most of all. WebFetch fails there; the Playwright MCP browser, on the operator's own session, is how you reach a source to confirm it. It is an accelerant, not a requirement: without it, a line you could not open at the source stays verified: no with a reason, and the file is still complete.
6. Write the file
Append to .monkeys/recon.md at the adopter's repo root, in the shape the front door already established:
## Pains
- <the pain in their own words> — heard in: <where> — reach: <n|unknown> — verified: <yes|no>
## Rooms
- <community or room> — audience: <who is there> — rules: <what they forbid> — entry cost: <what it takes to be welcome>
reach: is optional and new. Where you know how many people saw a phrase, record
it; where you do not, write unknown rather than leaving it out. A pain with no
reach figure is a real sentence and an unknown market, and those are different
claims. Never estimate it. An existing line without the field is still valid;
do not backfill one with a guess.
Add lines; don't rewrite lines someone else already verified. If a new pain contradicts one already in the file, keep both and let the contradiction show — that's real signal, not noise to resolve by deleting one.
7. What this doesn't decide
Recon finds the pain and the room. It does not decide what to say about a competitor (raid-asymmetry), what to do in the room (raid-stunt, raid-borrow), or when (raid-moment). Hand the file off; don't reach past it.
Recon also assumes you gathered the evidence yourself. Where it arrived as a
chatbot dump, a pasted transcript or someone else's summary, that is
scout-intake's job first: it grades what you were handed and finds what the dump
left out, then writes the Pains and Rooms here. Do not write a pain into this
file straight out of a summary. A summary is not a source, and once a line is
in this file it reads as one.