Individual skill
brief-from-pile
Turn a folder of accumulated documents into one decision-ready brief — the skim-map pass over the pile, the extraction against the brief's actual questions, the conflict reconciliation when documents disagree, and the provenance trail back to sources. Use when asked read all this and tell me what matters, synthesize this folder for the new lead, turn these 20 docs into a brief, or what does all this material actually say. Produces the pile map, the question-driven extraction, the reconciled brief with per-claim sources, and the didn't-read honesty ledger.
plugins/pm-cowork/skills/brief-from-pile/SKILL.md
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- Last checked
- Nov 9, 2026
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- License
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# Brief From Pile Skill
"Here's the folder — get up to speed and tell me what matters" is a real task with a bad default: reading everything start-to-finish, drowning evenly, and producing a summary of *documents* instead of an answer to *questions*. The pile discipline inverts it: define the brief's questions first (what does the reader need to decide or understand?), map the pile cheaply (what each doc is, its date, its likely contribution — the [repo-map](../repo-map/SKILL.md) philosophy applied to documents), read *against the questions* (deep where they're answered, skim where they're not), reconcile the disagreements between documents (piles always disagree — dates usually explain it), and keep the provenance trail, because a brief that can't say "per the Q3 postmortem" gets re-derived by the first skeptic.
## What This Skill Produces
- **The pile map** — every document: what it is, date, author-context, and its likely contribution to the questions
- **The extraction** — findings organized by the brief's questions (never by source document), each with its citation
- **The reconciliation** — where documents conflict: the resolution (usually recency or authority) or the honest open question
- **The brief + the honesty ledger** — the deliverable, plus what was skimmed/skipped and what the pile simply doesn't contain
## Required Inputs
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