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/compass — Internal vs Ambient Directional Assessment

Contrasts your internal implementation knowledge (sessions, GitHub, minutes, reference, idea) against ambient intelligence (feeds + bookmarks), locates where the two corpora connect, and emits a directional assessment — Ahead / Exposed / Decide / Confirm — first, before the supporting detail. The assessment is the product; the corpus sections are the evidence.

Where /radar senses the surroundings and /investigate maps the internal terrain, /compass puts the two together and points somewhere.

Usage

/compass sandbox networking            # Orient on a topic
/compass agent eval harnesses --days 14 # Custom ambient window (default 30)
/compass --entry <uuid>                 # Seed from a specific entry instead of a topic
/compass build hermeticity --project distillery  # Scope every search to a project
/compass --include-evergreen            # Include first-poll backfill in ambient signal
/compass sandbox networking --store     # Persist the assessment (default: display-only)

Trigger phrases: "compass", "where do we stand vs the field", "ahead or behind on X", "what should we do about X"

When to Use

  • "Where do we stand on X vs. the field, and what should we do?"
  • Comparing internal progress against external/ambient signal to surface gaps and risks
  • Pre-decision check: is the field discussing something you have no captured position on?
  • Orienting a specific entry against ambient signal (--entry <uuid>)

What It Does

Maps the internal terrain with one plain semantic search scoped to the implementation corpora (session, github, minutes, reference, idea) in summary mode. There is no graph expansion — the knowledge graph is sparse (orphan-heavy), so a graph walk adds latency without signal. The --entry <uuid> variant loads the seed entry directly, derives a topic from it, then runs the same scoped search to gather the surrounding terrain.

Ambient Signal (radar-style, windowed)

Senses the surroundings with two windowed searches — feeds and bookmarks — bounded by the ambient window (default 30 days). The window is bounded by metadata.published_at (publication time), not ingest time, so older items polled today are not counted as new intelligence. First-poll backfill (metadata.backfill = true) is excluded unless --include-evergreen is passed.

Where They Meet (cross-corpus seam)

The comparative step uses cross-vocabulary search, not embedding similarity or graph edges. Internal entries speak implementation-language (symbols, file paths, library names); ambient entries speak product-language (patterns, product names, capabilities) — the two occupy different embedding neighborhoods. Compass extracts up to 2 concrete entities/terms from each cluster and queries the other corpus with them (≤4 cross-queries total). A cross-query hit is a seam — the corpora connect on a shared concept expressed in different vocabulary. A disjoint result (the field discusses X, you have no captured position on X) is itself a finding and becomes an Exposed candidate.

Assessment

The verdict leads. Each bullet cites entries with [Entry <short-id>] (first 8 chars of the UUID), marked internal or ambient, across four categories (any empty category is omitted):

  • Ahead — you lead, or already have what the field is converging on.
  • Exposed — the field has it; you don't. A gap or risk.
  • Decide — an open question both corpora touch but no settled internal decision exists.
  • Confirm — an internal assumption the ambient signal validates or challenges.

Output Format

# Compass: sandbox networking

Oriented "sandbox networking": 6 internal + 4 ambient entries, 2 seams (window=30d).

## Assessment

**Ahead**
- We already ship the vsock transport the field is now converging on [Entry 9f8e7d6c, internal]

**Exposed**
- The now-GA egress-proxy-for-credentials pattern [Entry 1a2b3c4d, ambient] is not a captured requirement in the still-open egress issue [Entry 9f8e7d6c, internal] — add it

## Internal Position
<2–3 paragraph narrative with [Entry <short-id>] citations>

## Ambient Signal
<2–3 paragraph narrative of what feeds + bookmarks are saying in the window>

## Where They Meet
<Cross-vocabulary seams and disjoint ambient terms>

## Sources
| Short ID | Type | Author | Date | Provenance |
|----------|------|--------|------|------------|
| 1a2b3c4d | [feed] | — | 2026-06-12 | ambient |
| 9f8e7d6c | [github] | Alice | 2026-05-30 | internal |

Options

Flag Description
--days <n> Ambient look-back window in days (default 30), applied via published_after
--project <name> Scope every search (internal and ambient) to this project
--entry <uuid> Seed the Internal Position from a specific entry instead of a topic search
--include-evergreen Include older / first-poll backfill items in the ambient candidate set
--store Store the assessment as a digest entry (default: display-only)

Tips

  • The verdict comes first — read the Assessment, then dig into the evidence sections below it.
  • A disjoint result is a feature, not a miss: "the field is discussing X; we have no captured position on X" is exactly the kind of gap /compass exists to surface.
  • When the project is only inferred from your cwd (no --project), compass scopes softly and auto-widens to all projects if the internal search comes up empty — the topic often lives in another repo.
  • Display-only by default; pass --store to persist with tags compass/assessment/ambient for later retrieval.
  • Pairs with /radar (ambient digest) and /investigate (internal deep context) — /compass is the directional synthesis of the two.