Scholar Extract

this skill

Stage 2. Harvest the terms the corpus uses for its own things, each with a citation that shows the term in use.

Read references/citation.md for what a citation must carry and references/stage-gates.md for this stage's exit condition.

User arguments: $ARGUMENTS

What counts as a term

A term is a word the corpus uses for one of its own concepts. In code that is the names it gives things: type and class names, module and package names, recurring verbs in function names and commit subjects, the roles in its configuration, the nouns in its error messages. In prose it is the author's own vocabulary, taken from annotate's quotation set.

A term is not a word that merely appears. handler is a term where the project distinguishes handlers from services; it is noise where it is just what someone called a function once.

Procedure

1. Read the source list

Take sources.jsonl from gather. Harvest only from sources marked "read": true.

2. Harvest

For code, the cheapest high-yield passes, all portable:

$ rg -o --no-filename -r '$1' '\b(?:class|struct|interface|type)\s+(\w+)' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

$ git log --format=%s | rg -o '^\w+' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

Read the results; do not paste them into the table. Frequency proposes a candidate, the corpus's own definition confirms it.

3. Write terms.jsonl

One row per term as the corpus spells it:

{"schema": 1, "term": "adapter", "definition": "wraps a third-party client behind the port interface", "parent": "", "kind": "role", "tier": "structural", "cites": [{"url": "https://github.com/OWNER/REPO/blob/v2.40.0/src/ports.py#L12-L18", "locator": "src/ports.py:12-18", "quote": "every third-party client enters through a port"}]}

parent stays empty here. distill assigns it.

schema is the row format's version. It costs one integer now and cannot be added later without guessing what unversioned rows meant.

definition is drawn from the corpus, not composed. Where the corpus never defines the term, record the definition its usage implies and say so in the citation's quote by choosing a passage that shows the usage.

Rules

• Do not invent a term the corpus does not use.
• Do not normalize spellings. bump and update staying separate is what lets contest find the synonymy; merging them here destroys the evidence.
• Every row has a non-empty definition and at least one citation with a locator, or this stage does not hand off.
• A citation whose quoted text contains the term it supports is circular and does not count. Pick a passage that shows the term in use instead.
• Set tier to structural. Distributional claims are contest's to make, and they go in evidence/metrics.md, not on a term row.

Output

Open with a one-line hero (✓ <n> terms extracted from <n> sources or ⚠ Blocked: <reason>), then exactly these sections:

1. ## Terms — count by kind, and the ten most frequent with their definitions.
2. ## Rejected — candidates that looked like terms and were not, with why. This section is the one that shows the harvest was judged rather than scraped.
3. ## Gate — confirmation that every row has a definition and a citation.

End with an ask-user-choice panel offering next steps (for example: run distill, harvest another source, stop here) — skip the panel only in plan mode.

Portability notes

• ask-user-choice — present the listed options and wait for the user to pick one. Hosts with a structured multiple-choice tool (Claude Code's AskUserQuestion) should use it; otherwise print a numbered list and wait for a numbered reply. Never proceed on an assumed answer.
• $ARGUMENTS — the text the user passed when invoking this skill. If your host does not substitute it, read it as the user's request in the current turn, and ask when there is none.
• Bundled files — every relative path in this skill points at a file shipped inside this skill directory. Read them from here, not from the host's plugin tree.