Reading Queue Walk Use Case

• Use case ID: auto-walk.reading-queue
• Protocol: auto-walk@0.1.0
• Evidence: design-example
• Conformance: proposed — no protocol level has been executed
• Validation scope: testable rollout and provisional pitfalls only; no completed run is claimed
• Reproducibility: conceptual — sufficient to build a trial, but no run artifacts are included
• Level namespace: auto-walk
• Last reviewed: 2026-08-03

1. Context

This use case describes a standalone Auto-Walk binding for a personal reading queue — daily or weekly digests of articles, HN posts, blogs, papers, and newsletters. The walk runs over digested article summaries, produces cross-article associations, and writes Walk reports for periodic reading.

The design is a practical implementation of Agent-first Auto-Walk Architecture, specifically the standalone mode in §14. No agent-wiki memory is required.

This binding differs from Kiro Local Walk and Obsidian Notes Walk:

• The corpus is external content (others' writing), not your own.
• Items are short digests, not full notes or distilled memory.
• Discharge does not produce "facts about yourself" — it produces "pattern observations across what you've read."
• Cadence may be tighter (every 3–7 days), because the queue itself moves daily.

2. Design philosophy

This binding borrows from:

1. Agent-first Auto-Walk Architecture — protocol §5, §8, §14.
2. The "commonplace book" tradition — recording readings and noticing cross-reading patterns has been a creative practice for centuries (Darwin's notebooks, Bacon's Commonplaces, Locke's reading method).
3. Modern personal-digest patterns — RSS reader + summarization, "newsletter of newsletters," daily-digest skills like Kiro's x-digest.

Core claim:

Give your reading queue a periodic process that finds patterns across what you've read in the last several weeks — not just trending topics, but structural bridges (same problem reappearing in different domains, opposing claims about a shared question, emerging consensus you hadn't named yet).

3. Corpus layout

The queue and walks share one root:

~/reading-queue/                           # or wherever
├── inbox/                                 # raw saves before digestion
│   └── <url-or-clip-files>
├── digests/                               # per-day or per-week digest files
│   ├── 2026-05-22.md
│   ├── 2026-05-23.md
│   └── ...
└── walks/
    ├── reports/
    ├── active/
    ├── discharged/
    ├── rejected/
    ├── archived/
    ├── noteworthy/
    ├── log.md
    └── scripts/
        └── walk-run.sh

The inbox/ → digests/ flow is the user's existing reading workflow. The walk runner only reads digests/.

4. Digest item format

Each entry in a digest file is one item. Recommended format:

## <article title>

- **Source**: <source-url>
- **Type**: hn-thread | paper | blog | newsletter | video-transcript
- **Tags**: ai-agents, memory, walking-creativity
- **Read**: 2026-05-28

### One-line ELI5
<one sentence>

### Top 3 worth noticing
1. ...
2. ...
3. ...

### My note (optional)
<your reaction or follow-up question>

Items can be produced by:

• Manual save + summarize while reading.
• An LLM-driven daily digest of saved URLs.
• Existing tooling: Readwise export, RSS reader + auto-summarize.
• The user's own x-digest-style skill (see Kiro skills).

The walk runner does not care about the production path. It only requires that digest files exist with parseable item blocks.

5. Item model

Neighbor retrieval (§11.3 of protocol):

• Near: shares ≥ 2 tags with seed item
• Middle: shares 1 tag, or appears in the same digest week as items sharing seed tags
• Far: shares no tags but appears in the last N weeks; sample with weight against the most frequent tags in the queue

6. Walk runner

Walk every 3–7 days — tighter than the memory-coupled binding because the queue moves faster. Recommended starting cadence: weekly Friday, with optional mid-week light walks if the queue is very active.

Steps:

1. Skips if digests/ covers fewer than ~7 days, or fewer than ~15 items total.
2. Picks one propositional seed:
   • Default: a tag or theme that appeared in ≥ 3 items in the last 2 weeks.
   • Alternative: a "cross-week recurrence" — a theme that surfaced in non-consecutive weeks (suggests latent attention you may not have named).
3. Retrieves near/middle/far items per §11.3.
4. Runs INVENTORY → ROAM → CRITIQUE per §11.4.
5. Writes hypotheses to walks/active/. Routes critic-rejected-but-noteworthy candidates to walks/noteworthy/.
6. Writes a report to walks/reports/YYYY-MM-DD.md.
7. Appends to walks/log.md.

The runner is generic; any LLM tooling works.

7. Output mode — Walk Report with a reading agenda

The Walk Report follows the same shape as obsidian-notes-walk.md §7, with one addition: a Reading agenda section.

# Walk Report — 2026-05-28

## Seed
"Recurring tension between local-first and cloud-first design across agent tooling articles in May"

## Inventory
- HN thread on local LLMs (2026-05-15)
- Cloud-coupled agent memory announcement (2026-05-18)
- Privacy considerations blog (2026-05-22)
- ...

## Candidate associations

### hyp-2026-05-28-001 — Three articles converge on the same trade-off...
- **Refs**: digest/2026-05-15.md#hn-thread, digest/2026-05-18.md#announcement, digest/2026-05-22.md#blog
- **Applies when**: future articles about agent architecture appear in queue
- **Confidence**: medium
- **Why it may matter**: ...

## Critic rejections
- R3 — <claim> → rejected: single-source generalization
- ...

## Noteworthy
- ...

## Reading agenda (suggested follow-ups)

- The HN thread cites paper X — worth adding to queue.
- Open question across these articles: <one sentence>.
- A digest tag that should split: `agents` is too broad; consider splitting into `agent-memory` / `agent-tooling`.

The Reading agenda is the standalone analog of "side-note in conversation." It is the actionable output the user can immediately use without any agent loop.

8. Lifecycle adaptations

8.1 Discharge is observational, not factual

A confirmed hypothesis here is "a pattern across articles I've read," not "a fact about my own work." The declared confirmation target (protocol §6.2 / §14.1 item 6) is the user's own note layer — notes vault, journal, or follow-up digest — outside walks/, stably addressable, and written only by the user as its authorized writer. The confirmation step:

• The user writes the pattern observation as a personal note in that target.
• The user moves the hypothesis from active/ to discharged/.
• At discharge, the YAML MUST carry note_link — the conclusion note's stable address, realizing the §13.1 back-pointer — and the note or the discharged YAML records the real confirmation Source with the hypothesis id kept separately as inspired_by (protocol §6.2.1), so evidence and lineage stay auditable and distinct.

8.2 Decay is faster

Articles age out faster than personal notes. Recommended:

• expires_after_walks: 6 for normal items (vs 12 in memory-coupled).
• The superseded path (§13.4) sees more use — a fresh walk often produces a more general version of a prior bridge.

8.3 No A mode

Same as obsidian-notes-walk.md §8.2. The report is the surface.

9. Key design decisions

9.1 Why a queue, not a full library

The walk works best on recently-read material. A queue of "this week's reading" is the right unit, not "everything I've ever read." Older digests can be moved to digests/archive/ to keep the active scope tight.

9.2 Why tighter cadence (3–7 days, not weekly)

Reading queues turn over faster than personal notes. A weekly walk over the last 4 weeks of reading produces fresh bridges; a monthly walk would miss most.

9.3 Why include a Reading agenda in reports

The user's natural question after seeing a pattern is "OK, now what?" The Reading agenda answers that without requiring any conversation: "read X next," "split tag Y," "watch for Z."

9.4 Why human-curated digests, not pure LLM summarization

LLM-only summarization tends to flatten differences across articles. Human curation — even just deciding which articles to digest at all — preserves attention signal, which becomes input to seed selection. The walk works better when the queue itself was curated.

10. Testable rollout

10.1 auto-walk:L1 — Build the queue and one manual walk

1. Set up ~/reading-queue/digests/ and add 1–2 weeks of digest files. Use existing tooling (x-digest, manual saves, etc.) — do not block on a perfect digest pipeline.
2. Pick a propositional seed by hand.
3. Run the multi-pass prompt; write hypotheses to walks/active/ and a report to walks/reports/.
4. Read the report.

Pass criterion: at least one hypothesis names a real cross-article bridge that you had not consciously noticed.

10.2 auto-walk:L2 — Scheduled

Same as obsidian §10.2 but with the tighter cadence (3–7 days).

10.3 auto-walk:L3 — Report surface

The generated report is this binding's surfacing target. No A mode is required in this standalone profile.

10.4 auto-walk:L4 — Optional feedback loop

Similar to obsidian §10.4: track confirmation rates per topic over time.

11. Integration with existing tooling

If the user already has personal-digest patterns:

• x-digest (Kiro skill): outputs daily tech-news summaries. Pipe its output directly into digests/.
• Readwise / Reader: export to Markdown into inbox/, transform via a daily script into digests/.
• RSS reader + auto-summarize (Feedly + LLM): same pipeline.
• Hypothesis.is / web annotations: extract highlights as digest items.

The walk does not care about the production path. It only requires the structured digest format in §4.

12. Pitfalls (provisional)

13. Evidence boundary

What this design contributes

• A structured digest corpus adapter, report format, and reading-agenda output for a trial.
• Explicit privacy, staleness, and format-drift risks to validate.

What it does not demonstrate

• That the proposed cadence, thresholds, or agenda improve reading outcomes.
• That any named integration produces the assumed Markdown shape today.
• Any completed protocol level or observed user benefit.

14. Essence

The queue holds what you've read.
The walk reads your readings periodically.
The walk produces bridges, not summaries.
The Reading agenda turns bridges into next actions.

Auto-Walk for a reading queue turns passive consumption into latent insight production.