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 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

Ask for these if not provided:

• The pile — the documents (or their contents); the map works on what's actually there
• The reader and their questions — who is this for and what must they decide/understand ("the new lead needs: state of the project, open risks, why past decisions were made") — without questions, the output is a book report
• The pile's history, if known — why these documents accumulated, which are drafts vs. finals (doc-versioning-discipline status often missing — the map infers and flags)
• The deadline and depth — an afternoon's brief reads differently than a week's; the map allocates reading time by expected contribution