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Research

Pareto

Maps any topic's zeitgeist and frontier — sweeps YouTube, GitHub, the web and the Research skill, ranks everything down to the vital few by relevance, reach, recency and outlier-ness, then reports the past meta, the current mainstream meta, and where the forward thinkers are heading, every frontier claim linked

Workflow

Tools

Reference

Triggers

Key Points

Not for answering a specific factual question (Research), analyzing one piece of content (ExtractWisdom), or AI industry news digests (Upgrade NewsDigest; security news SecurityUpdates)

Inside the Skill

The thinking, frameworks, and architecture that distinguish this skill from a generic version of the same task.

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

Workflows & Routing · 1

Each workflow is one job the skill runs. The trigger phrases route your request to the right one — this is the skill's routing table.

01

Run Intents/Run.md

any topic: pareto X, whats the zeitgeist on X, where are the forward thinkers going on X

Tools · 3

Deterministic executables the workflows call — the code that does the real work, not prompt scaffolding.

Check.ts
Collect.ts
Rank.ts

How to Invoke

Say any of these to your DA and LifeOS activates the Pareto skill automatically:

"pareto"
"pareto this"
"run pareto on"
"zeitgeist"
"what's the zeitgeist on"
"what's the meta on"
"what is the current meta"
"where is thinking on X heading"
"who are the forward thinkers on"
"who is ahead of the curve on"
"what are the big thinkers saying about"
"top content on a topic"
"vital few"

Or invoke explicitly:

Skill("Pareto")

References · 1

Auxiliary files the skill loads at runtime — frameworks, guides, configs.

Setup

Related Skills

Want LifeOS to do this for you?

Install LifeOS on your machine — your DA gets the Pareto skill plus 96 others, all hooked into one Life OS.

Install LifeOS View on GitHub