Discourse Has Weather.

01 · The Premise

Stop running pipelines. Start checking the weather.

The old InfraNodus skill was a pipeline: analyze, find gaps, generate questions, done. Same sequence every time, regardless of what the text actually looked like. The v2 skill replaces that with an ecological loop borrowed from Panarchy theory — the cycle of growth, saturation, release, and reorganization that ecosystems pass through.

Every analysis follows a recursive spiral. You sense the discourse state first, pick tools based on what you find, then re-sense to see what shifted. The agent's job is not to execute a sequence — it's to drive the spiral toward productive states.

This explainer walks through the five elements that make the v2 skill an actual decision protocol instead of a checklist: the spiral itself, the six discourse states it diagnoses, the transition map between them, the tools that drive each transition, and the failure mode (stagnation) that the whole architecture exists to prevent.

02 · The Spiral

Five steps. No fixed length. The loop is the point.

Sense, then diagnose, then intervene, then bridge, then re-sense. Each cycle generates knowledge, which generates new questions, which require new tool runs. You don't finish — you stop when the discourse is in a productive state.

What each step does

Sense — run generate_knowledge_graph to get the structural readout: modularity, cluster count, top-node betweenness, diversity score.

Diagnose — read the full output, not just numbers. The metrics can say "diversified" while the too_focused_on_top_clusters flag says otherwise. Trust the flags.

Intervene — look up the diagnosis in the Adaptive Response Table (Section 03 below) and run the prescribed primary + secondary tools.

Bridge — develop_conceptual_bridges runs every cycle. v2 promotes it from optional to core practice. It connects the local discourse to broader context.

Re-sense — re-run the graph after intervention. Did the state shift? If yes, loop with the new diagnosis. If no for two cycles in a row, you've hit stagnation — switch to escape mechanisms.

03 · The Six Discourse States

The diagnosis tells you which protocol to run.

Each state has a metric signature (what the modularity and cluster numbers look like) and a prescription (which tools run as primary and secondary intervention). The first job is matching what you see to one of these.

04 · State Map

The transitions are the point.

Diagnoses are not destinations. Each state has a default trajectory toward another state — and v2 names the mechanism. Click a state to see where it goes and what gets it there.

05 · The Transition Table

How states change — and how to drive the change on purpose.

The map above is the visual. The table below is the protocol. Each row is a transition: the mechanism that produces it and the tool sequence that executes it.

What a real transition looks like in metrics

From the live demo in Section 3 of the source walkthrough — adding bridging content to a "focused" graph and re-sensing:

One round moved the needle but didn't complete the transition. Diversity score is still "focused." This is the iterative truth of the spiral: transitions take more than one cycle. You intervene, re-sense, and if the state hasn't fully moved, you intervene again.

06 · Tool Inventory

Twenty-four tools. Six categories. One mental model: cost gating.

The toolbox you draw from when the Adaptive Response Table tells you what to run. The big v2 promotion: develop_conceptual_bridges is now core practice — run it every workflow, not just when you remember.

07 · The Adaptive Workflow

Deep text analysis, end to end.

The primary workflow — what you run when someone hands you text and says "analyze this." The branching logic in steps 3 and 4 is what makes v2 adaptive. Old workflow ran the same four tools every time. v2 picks the right tools for the actual state.

08 · Stagnation & Escape

The whole architecture exists to prevent fixed points.

Stagnation is the failure mode. When re-analysis produces the same clusters and gaps, the discourse has hit a fixed point — the spiral isn't moving anything. Sameness = symmetry = stuck. Each escape mechanism works by injecting asymmetry.

Why this works

Stagnation is symmetry. The system has reached an equilibrium where the same inputs produce the same outputs. Each escape mechanism breaks a different symmetry: scale (the resolution), perspective (the reader), and structure (the priority order). Inject any one of those and the system has to re-organize.

09 · Open Threads

What's left to build.

Two things from the source walkthrough that should be picked up next. Both are about extending the spiral from single-document analysis to a continuously-running practice.