Transcript Promotion

Lift substantive inline content from the ephemeral transcript surface to the durable plan-file surface. Extract verbatim, prepend canonical frontmatter, propagate to chezmoi-source so the autoCommit+autoPush cascade fires, and register the artifact in any series it belongs to.

Why this exists

Sessions produce two kinds of substantive output:

1. File-bound — code edits, plan writes, IRF rows, memory entries. These propagate via Write|Edit tool hooks and naturally land on disk + remote.
2. Conversation-bound — dense reference deliveries, "engine logs", inline analyses, multi-section walkthroughs the user reads and reacts to in-chat.

Class (2) is durable in the JSONL transcript but invisible to ~/.claude/plans/INDEX.md, MEMORY.md, and the chezmoi-source mirror. The transcript is on disk, but the content is buried inside conversation text rather than promoted to a discoverable artifact. A future session reading the plans index sees nothing; the content effectively dies with context exit.

Genesis case (2026-05-20 session 9cb55c4d): three engine reference docs (LOG #1 statusLine, LOG #2 Hooks, LOG #3 Subagents) delivered inline. LOG #1 was persisted to a plan file by the same session. LOG #2 and #3 were marked "inline only — not file-persisted" in the closeout. Two days later (2026-05-22), under explicit prompt to verify durability, they were extracted from the JSONL and promoted via the protocol now codified in this skill.

Pairs with artifact-resurfacing as the inverse motion:

• artifact-resurfacing — citation points at nothing → reconcile the citation
• transcript-promotion — content exists with no citation → mint the citation