Working by recipe

A house needs judgments that no deterministic code can make: which topic a document belongs to, whether two name forms are one person, what a volume is about. In the house software each of these is a route: code builds the context, a model judges once without tools, code checks the verdict and applies it. A recipe hands you that route to run yourself, on your own model, with the skills of the author door.

Three ways to judge in a house

Way	What the house does	Status
Free-hand	nothing; you decide what to read and what to assert	today
By recipe	nothing; the recipe tells you the route, the prompt and the checks	today
From the list of open work	builds the context, hands you prompt and answer form, checks and applies your verdict	today, for outlining and assigning topics; see `the-list-of-open-work`

The four recipes, and their order

Order	Recipe	Judgment
1	`recipe-assign-topics`	which of the owner's topics a document belongs to
2	`recipe-resolve-names`	which name forms in a text are persons, places, organizations
3	`recipe-merge-name-forms`	which of those identities are the same individual
4	`recipe-summarise-a-volume`	a digest per document, so that a search finds the right one

The order is that of the house software: outline, topics, names, digest. There is no recipe for outlining. Outlining is only safe as a program: the model returns nothing but block marks, and code builds the new version behind three locks against text loss. By hand you would rewrite the whole text, which is the error the route exists to prevent. Outlining is on the list of open work instead: list_work shows which documents need it.

So use the recipes on documents that arrive with structure (Markdown, or HTML from a web capture), or after their outline task is done: an outline creates a new version of the document, and work done on the old version will be offered again. Where the list holds a judgment (assigning topics), prefer the list: the house checks your verdict and stamps it.

A digest is a document too, and list_documents returns it. The first three recipes skip digests: the aspect Verdichtung in overview names a collection, and list_collection on it lists them.

How to run a judgment

Fetch the context with the skills the recipe names, and build the input exactly as shown. The form of the input is part of the prompt.
Judge with the prompt as given. If you can delegate, hand prompt and input to a sub-agent without tools, one call per unit: that is how the route runs in the house software, and it keeps your own context from colouring the verdict.
Produce the answer form before you act. A verdict you cannot write in that form is not one.
Run the checks of the recipe on your own verdict. They are the guards of the route, in words.
Apply with the skills the recipe names, in its order.

read_skill shows the arguments of a skill, not its answer. Where a recipe needs a value from an answer, it names the field, such as stored.id.

Where the prompts come from

Each recipe names the file and commit of its prompt in the house software. There the prompts ran in production on one German estate of diaries, letters and chronicles, and they name that corpus and use German examples. Here every prompt is adapted: the rules of judgment are kept sentence for sentence, the corpus is no longer named, and examples are English. In this form none has run at scale. Rules that depend on the language of your documents say so; adjust their examples to your corpus.

What no recipe does

No guard runs in the house. It accepts what you assert. One example, tried on a running house: merge_into joins a person to an organization without complaint.
No stamp is written. The routes mark what they judged with stamps computed by code. A recipe writes none, so nothing tells a later visitor what you already judged except the facts you left. The list of open work offers a document again whose topics you assigned by recipe, because it finds no stamp.
No lock. Two agents following the same recipe at once do the work twice. Asserting the same fact twice is harmless; merging is not.

Say who judged

A house keeps who said what. Name yourself once, then leave a note where you judged:

name_speaker {"name": "<your name and model>"}
add_note {"thing_id": "<what you judged>", "author_id": "<speaker.id>",
          "text": "<recipe, verdict in a sentence>", "time": "2026-10-02T21:30:00"}

name_speaker finds the same speaker again by its name. time is wall time to the second, in that form. Take the moment your run began and pass it with every note of the run: a call that is repeated then writes nothing, where a note without time is written again each second. Name the thing in the text. The same words by the same author at the same time are one note, and at a second thing it is attached again (is_new: false, appended: true), not written anew.

Words you will meet

The house software grew in German. Thema is topic, Umschreibung its description, Verdichtung a digest, fassung a version, Ort a place, Organisation an organization, Erwähnung a mention.