Skill: situate-daily-notes

Situate yourself by generating a 1-page situation report and maintaining Obsidian-style daily summary notes.

When to use

• On demand only when the user asks you to "situate yourself" or "catch up"
• When you need to recall what's been discussed recently
• As a required chained step of /workspace/.pi/skills/close-of-day/SKILL.md

Do not run this automatically at session start.

Quick start

bun run /workspace/scripts/situate.ts

This:

1. Prints a 1-page situation report (environment, preferences, notes, tasks, skills)
2. Aggregates activity across all relevant session trees for the target chat scope
   • for web:*, this means all web session trees (root chats plus branches)
   • message previews are labelled so parallel branches stay distinguishable
3. Generates daily note skeletons for any days that don't have one yet
4. Refreshes agent-facing sidecars and rolling context files derived from the daily notes
5. Reads the rolling agent-memory outputs first and includes them in the situation report
6. Lists any notes that need summaries or partial updates

After running, check for unsummarized notes and write them (see below).

Daily note format

Each daily note now has an agent-facing sidecar at notes/daily/YYYY-MM-DD.agent.json plus rolling summaries under notes/agent-memory/.

situate.ts now consumes those rolling outputs first when building the report, so the agent-facing layer is actually read back during catch-up flows.

• notes/agent-memory/current-state.json — compact machine-readable state for recent days
• notes/agent-memory/recent-context.md — concise markdown digest for quick reload

The narrative markdown note remains the human-readable source; the sidecar is the compact machine layer.

Notes live in notes/daily/YYYY-MM-DD.md and start with YAML front matter:

---
date: 2026-03-04
summarised_until: 2026-03-04T17:55:35.286Z
messages_total: 25
messages_user: 10
messages_assistant: 15
session_trees: 2
session_chats: 4
first_message: 2026-03-04T12:31:03.860Z
last_message: 2026-03-04T17:55:17.309Z
scope_mode: all-web-session-trees
scope_anchor: web:default
---

• date must match the file name.
• summarised_until is the timestamp of the last message covered by the summary.
• session_trees / session_chats show how many distinct trees/chats contributed to that day.
• For web:* scopes, scope_mode: all-web-session-trees means the note metadata was aggregated across all web roots and branches, not just one visible tab.

Writing daily summaries

Daily notes are summaries only — the chat DB is the source of truth for full transcripts.

When situate.ts or daily-notes.ts reports notes needing summaries:

1. For each file listed, read it to see the date and stats.
2. Use the unified messages tool as the primary source for transcript gathering:
   • search to locate the day/range you need
   • get to pull exact rows with surrounding context
   • if needed, paginate with limit/offset
3. Only fall back to extract-chat-history.ts for large exports or if you explicitly need a full transcript artifact.
4. Read the conversation and write a concise narrative summary (1–3 paragraphs) covering:
   • What was worked on (group by theme, not chronologically)
   • Key outcomes and what got deployed/built/configured
   • Any unresolved blockers or open threads
   • When multiple session trees were active, keep materially different branches distinct instead of blending them into one thread
5. Replace <!-- NEEDS_SUMMARY --> in the note with the summary, and set summarised_until in the front matter to the last message timestamp.

Partial updates

If situate.ts reports Partial Summaries, append a block like this:

## Summary update (18:10 UTC)

<!-- NEEDS_SUMMARY_UPDATE -->

Then:

• Use messages.search for the post-watermark range
• Use messages.get for any exact rows that need more surrounding context
• Use the situation report's tree/chat labels to keep parallel branches separate while you summarise
• Write a short update summary for the new messages
• Update summarised_until in the front matter to the last message timestamp shown in the report

Example summary style

Set up Azure OpenAI end-to-end. Created piclawendpoints in Sweden Central, deployed six models across GlobalStandard and DataZoneStandard. Wired managed identity auth with token caching into piclaw. Added a /image command.

Cleaned stale deployments from pragma and dogma. Set up dual backups (restic + Azure Backup vault). Built metrics charting and subscription diagram skills. Implemented TOTP on the web UI.

Rules

• Never overwrite a note that already has a real summary.
• Today's note gets refreshed (metadata update) but its summary is preserved.
• Keep summaries short and dense — this is for quick context recovery, not documentation.
• After summaries are updated, rerun situate.ts or daily-notes.ts so the .agent.json sidecars and rolling notes/agent-memory/ outputs stay in sync.

Options

Standalone daily notes generation

bun run /workspace/scripts/daily-notes.ts [--days <n>] [--force]

Full chat transcript export

For a complete unabridged transcript with H1 headers per day:

bun run /workspace/scripts/extract-chat-history.ts --summary --out /workspace/exports/web-chat-full.md

For web:*, this export now includes all web session trees and annotates each message with its tree/chat label.

Tone

Terse British English. No excitement, no emoji, no "big day" openers. State what was done.

Related

• The close-of-day skill runs this situate flow (with --update-notes) as part of end-of-day maintenance.
• This is the preferred way to maintain daily note metadata before timeline cleanup.