Pareto

Most of what gets said about a topic is repetition. A few people and a few pieces carry the signal, and some of them are early. Pareto sweeps wide, ranks down to that vital few, and reports how thinking has moved and where it is going next.

Ideal State

• The principal can act on a run without redoing the search: who to follow and what to read first are named, each with a link from the collected data.
• A failed or quota-limited source narrows the sweep but never aborts the run, and the result names every source that failed.
• Ranking keeps the vital few on topic: off-topic viral items and cracked-software lure repos never reach the ranked set.
• Every era claim (past, current, frontier) carries a date taken from the source itself, never a crawl date.

Intent Routing

Intent	Trigger	File
Run	any topic: "pareto X", "what's the zeitgeist on X", "where are the forward thinkers going on X"	Intents/Run.md

File	Read when
Tools/<Name>.help.md	calling or changing Collect (the sweep), Rank (scoring to the vital few) or Check (the report gate): flags, env, output shape
Setup.md	first-time setup: the four sources, the keys and accounts each needs, and a read-only sweep to prove them

Data & Config

Credentials are env var names only, read from the LifeOS .env: YOUTUBE_API_KEY (YouTube Data API v3), PERPLEXITY_API_KEY (web search). GitHub uses the authenticated gh CLI.

First-time setup for these sources is in Setup.md.

User customizations live at <configRoot>/LIFEOS/USER/CUSTOMIZATIONS/SKILLS/Pareto/ (configRoot is $CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR when set, else ~/.claude). When that directory exists, its PREFERENCES.md (for example default sources, sweep size, or sources to skip) overrides the defaults in Intents/Run.md; when it is absent, the defaults stand.

Gotchas

• YouTube search costs 100 quota units per call out of a 10,000 daily default. One run makes four searches plus cheap stats calls, so about 25 full runs a day before quota errors; a quota error shows as a failed youtube source, never a failed run.
• A viral hit also beats its channel baseline (a 3M-view video on a 50k channel), so outlier alone flagged 73 of 100 items as frontier on the first real run. A frontier candidate needs both measured reach outside the top third of its source and outlier ≥ 0.6; sources with no reach signal never qualify except Research picks.
• GitHub search for a software category returns cracked-software lure repos ("SketchUp-Pro-Download-2026", "ZBrush-Activator"; second real run, 3D modeling, 2026-09-25). These are malware bait. Rank drops repos whose names match the lure pattern or that have under 10 stars; never link one in a report.
• One shared word let off-topic content in: "3D modeling software" admitted 3D-printing Shorts on "3d" alone. Items must contain 60% of the topic terms (both of two, two of three). Phrase topics as the category ("3D modeling software"), not as a judgment ("best 3D modeling system"), because "best" and "system" match everything.
• Percentiles are computed over on-topic items only. A viral off-topic video once took the top outlier slot from the real one in testing; the relevance floor runs before any scoring.
• The "top-reach" line in Check is the top third of reach within a source. A decile cut never fires on small sources.
• Perplexity last_updated is the crawl date, not the publish date. Used as a fallback it dated a 2025-09 arXiv paper to 2026-09 (first real run, 2026-09-25). The collector now leaves such items undated; date claims in the report come from the page itself.
• YouTube transcripts come from the Gemini watch pass on the public URL, never from scraped captions. A video the watch pass refuses is named in the report as unread; the run never retries it through another route.

Examples

Example 1: A topic sweep

User: "Pareto agentic coding"
→ Run intent
→ ~/Downloads/pareto-agentic-coding-<date>.md: past meta, current meta, frontier, who to follow

Example 2: Phrased as a question

User: "Where are the big thinkers going on personal AI infrastructure?"
→ Same intent; the console summary leads with the one-sentence shift and two names