Paperclip Distill

Distill Paperclip project, issue, comment, and document activity into durable wiki pages. The success criterion is wiki-insightful, not procedural: a reader who has never seen Paperclip should learn what the project is, what was decided, what is at risk, and what the current state is — without scanning a list of ## [YYYY-MM-DD] headers.

When this skill is needed

• Cursor-window distillation: the routine fed you a bounded source bundle of recent Paperclip activity for one project or root issue.
• Backfill: the user asked to seed the wiki with the historical activity of a project or root issue. Source window may be wide.
• Manual distill-paperclip-now request from the UI.

If the operation issue is operationType: "ingest" (raw file) or operationType: "query", this is the wrong skill — use wiki-ingest or wiki-query.

Destination space

In Phase 1, every Paperclip distill, backfill, and cursor-window operation writes into the default wiki space. The operation issue should always carry spaceSlug: "default". If an operation issue passes any other slug, stop and surface the mismatch in a comment — do not write Paperclip-derived pages into a non-default space.

This rule is destination-only. The Paperclip source scope (which projects, root issues, comments, documents are read) is set elsewhere in the operation issue and is independent of the destination.

Inputs

• A Paperclip source bundle (issue list, comment refs, document refs, source hash, cursor window).
• An existing or planned wiki/projects/<slug>/standup.md page path.
• An existing or planned wiki/projects/<slug>/index.md page path.
• The operation issue's target wikiId, spaceSlug, space root, and the target space's AGENTS.md for page conventions.
• The current wiki/projects/<slug>/standup.md, wiki/projects/<slug>/index.md, decisions.md, and history.md if they already exist (so you write a patch, not a rewrite).

Paperclip Asset Gate

Do not treat Paperclip assets/attachments or issue work products as source text for this skill.

• Allowed Paperclip body text: issue descriptions, comment bodies, document bodies.
• Assets/attachments are metadata-only until a separate approved extraction policy exists.
• Work products are metadata-only until a separate approved extraction policy exists.
• Never fetch /api/assets/:id/content.
• Never dereference a work-product url, preview URL, artifact URL, or other linked destination from this skill.
• If an operator asks for attachment/work-product content distillation, stop and point them at the Phase 5 asset/work-product security gate policy instead of improvising.

Anti-patterns to avoid

The deterministic templating this skill replaces produced these failure modes — do not reproduce them:

1. Datestamp-as-section-header. Lines like ## [2026-04-15] paperclip-distill | proposed belong in wiki/log.md, not in the project page. The project page is durable knowledge; the log is the audit trail.
2. Procedural status lists. Issue mix: 3 todo, 5 in_progress, 2 done tells the reader nothing they could not read off Paperclip directly. State what is happening and why it matters, then cite the issues that constitute the evidence.
3. One-line-per-issue dumps. A page that is mostly - PAP-1234: title (in_progress, updated 2026-...) is an issue list, not a wiki page. Group issues by what they are about (a decision, a risk, a workstream) and cite multiple issues per bullet when they share a story.
4. Mechanical "Current as of" timestamps everywhere. One current_as_of in frontmatter is enough.
5. No interpretation. "Active issues: PAP-A, PAP-B, PAP-C" is bookkeeping. "The team is concentrating on the schema migration ([PAP-A], [PAP-B]) and has parked the index work pending capacity ([PAP-C])." is wiki-insightful.
6. Opaque identifiers in prose. UUIDs, cursor ids, source hashes, run ids, and raw metadata belong in logs or frontmatter when needed, not in executive-facing project narrative.

Workflow

1. Read the bundle in full. Don't sample. Read every issue title, every comment, every document key the bundle includes. Note: which issues are decisions, which are risks/blockers, which are recently completed, which are inflight.

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