Saturation Sweep

Seed question: What hasn't the sweep reached yet?

Relentless self-reflexive dialectical thinking that questions its own premises.

Core Principle

Vertical investigation digs where the story is; horizontal investigation asks where else the story could be. Both are needed, but only the second can say when searching is DONE: saturation is a measurement (novelty per wave), not a feeling of completeness — the feeling arrives long before the coverage does.

The anti-pattern this counters:

❌ Searching until a coherent narrative forms, then stopping
❌ "I did several searches" with no record of which axes they covered
❌ Coverage claims that cannot name what was NOT reached

The pattern this enforces:

✅ Declare the branching axes BEFORE sweeping
✅ Sweep in waves; ledger the novelty of each wave
✅ Stop on the rule, not the feeling — and report where the sweep stayed thin

When This Applies

TRIGGER:

• The completeness question, asked or implied: "How do we know we're done?", "What are we missing?", "Have we covered everything?", "Is that the whole story?"
• An investigation has produced one coherent narrative and is about to close on it — the vertical story satisfies, but nobody has asked where else it could live.
• Coverage across actors, intermediaries, regions, jurisdictions, language-publics, or time periods matters as much as depth on any single thread.
• Designing or running a multi-agent sweep (waves of blind workers over branching axes).
• A claim of thoroughness needs to be auditable — a ledger someone else can check — not asserted from a feeling of having looked enough.

DO NOT TRIGGER:

• Single-fact lookups or quick answers (a definition, a date, a capital city) — no coverage question is in play.
• A vertical deep-dive on one already-found thread or one named document — that is deep-investigation-protocol, not breadth.
• Verifying a specific found claim rather than mapping breadth — that is iterative-verification.

The Sweep

1. Declare axes. Before wave 1, list the branching axes for THIS investigation. Standard set (extend, don't shrink): who-else (actors, intermediaries, beneficiaries) · where-else (regions, jurisdictions, language-publics) · when-else (earlier precedents, later echoes) · who-benefits-elsewhere (adjacent markets/policy areas). An axis declared and skipped must appear in the thin-slot; an axis never declared is invisible — that is why declaration comes first.
2. Wave. One pass across all declared axes (queries or agents — see assets/agent-prompts.md for the multi-agent recipe). New material is logged per axis.
3. Ledger. After each wave, fill one ledger row (format below). Novelty = new entities + new claims, as a share of the running total.
4. Stop rule. Stop when a wave's novelty is under ~10%, OR two consecutive waves move no verdict in the per-claim table. Both conditions are measurements against the ledger — cite the rows when declaring saturation.
5. Report the thin spots. Mandatory, honest: where did the sweep stay thin (axes shallowly covered, languages not searched, platforms unreachable), why, and what could hide there.

Novelty Ledger (format)

Wave	Axes swept (queries/agents per axis)	New entities	New claims	Verdicts moved	Novelty %

Mandatory Output Slots

Slot	Contents	Invalid when
Axes declared	The branching axes, declared before wave 1	Declared retroactively; or fewer than the standard set without a stated reason
Novelty ledger	One row per wave, all columns filled	Missing waves; novelty asserted without counts
Stop-rule verdict	Which stop condition fired, citing ledger rows	"Felt complete"; stopping without a fired condition and without saying so
Where the sweep stayed thin	Axes/languages/platforms under-covered, why, what could hide there	Empty; "nowhere"; only unreachable-by-anyone items listed

Relationship to Verification

The sweep finds; it does not verify. Claims enter the investigation at the tier the evidence supports, [RELAY]-tagged when they arrive through agent summaries (Principle P1 (relayed-is-not-read)). Saturation of a false story is saturation of a false story — run iterative-verification on what the sweep returns.

Cross-References

• research hub — the profile's saturation threshold defaults to this stop rule; report template's Metadata & limits section consumes the thin-slot
• investigation-orchestrator agent — deploys waves as agent teams using assets/agent-prompts.md
• iterative-verification — verification of what the sweep returns
• ground-level-triangulation — the where-else axis specialized to language-publics with independent stakes

Vasana

A vasana is a pattern that persists across unrelated contexts. If during this task you notice such a pattern emerging, it may be worth capturing. This skill works best alongside the vasana skill and vasana hook from the Vasana System plugin.

Modify freely. Keep this section intact.