The GHOST protocol pipeline#

Turn a subject's published thinking into three governed artifacts: a verified source corpus, a GHOST-conforming counselor, and reusable process expressions. Seven phases; every phase declares inputs, outputs, an exit test, and who may perform it. Agents draft; the operator decides. This skill was proven on a full pilot traversal before publication; its rules are the ones that survived contact.

Phase map#

Phase 0: qualify (spec 4.2)#

1. Identify the subject; disambiguate from namesakes.
2. Determine subject status: living, deceased, or none. This fixes the persona class (spec 3.1) and everything downstream: living without participation is simulated (private use only, GH-12); deceased is projection (rights declaration required, GH-13; corpus closure, 9.2); no real person is composite.
3. Corpus existence test: the method is published or licensed, or there is no counselor (4.1.1).
4. Evidence-gatherable test: there is a record of the principal's to counsel against (6.3, GH-14).
5. Honest-frame survival test: if the value depends on anyone believing the projection is the person, stop (4.2).

Phases 1 to 2: discover, then collect#

Breadth first: a census of everything that exists (official properties, works, recordings, independent secondary sources, criticism), each row carrying a provenance class. Then bounded depth: harvest what the census marks in scope, prefer local tooling over paid services, persist raw material in a durable evidence store outside the knowledge base, and record source, retrieval date, and content hash for everything held, because those rows become the corpus manifest (4.1.1; schema: schema/v1/corpus-manifest.schema.json). Never harvest full copyrighted texts; acquisition of licensed copies is an operator purchase decision the pipeline recommends and never makes.

Phase 3: verify and score#

The skeptic pass. The binding lesson: the practices are testable, the testimony is not; audit biography and method as separate objects. Score five dimensions, weighted: identity and biography (15; capped at 50 while no disinterested source corroborates the outline of the life), corpus coverage (25), method triangulation (30; an element counts when attested in two or more independent sources), rights clarity (15), criticism coverage (15).

Route on the score. At or above threshold, proceed. Below it, loop to phase 2 with the gaps named in the ledger: the score measures collection depth, never subject fitness. Return to phase 0 only when a qualification-relevant fact changes. The operator may waive the threshold for a subject; record the waiver, keep every artifact marked partially verified, and never let the waiver rewrite the rule.

Phase 4: distill#

Five notes, same names every time: the subject hub (biography with verified versus claimed columns, credibility audit, body of work, rights posture); structure and principles of the primary work; core practices as trigger, action, artifact, cadence, failure mode; claims, evidence, and criticism (including the uncited statistics, flagged so they are never laundered); reusable primitives with an explicit discard list. Function crosses; expression never does: no verbatim scripts, no wording close enough to be recognized.

Phase 5: charter (operator only)#

Use the ghost-counselor-creation skill. Nothing in this phase is an agent's act: agents draft the charter and manifest; the recorded creation act (4.1.3), the persona-class declaration, and the self test sign-off are the operator's.

Phase 6: express#

Map the distilled primitives into the operator's own process library as proposals. Adopt, adapt, or discard each primitive with the reason recorded; adaptation is normal (a method's "the seller decides" becomes "recommend plainly, the principal decides", which is the spec's own terminal control, 6.5). A counselor, once created, reviews the drafts at its declared rung: questions only at rung 0, and disagreement between counselors is surfaced, never resolved by them (6.4).

Failure classes this pipeline must not produce#

GH-02 (speaking as the subject), GH-05 (fabricated attribution), GH-06 (creation without manifest or class), GH-12 (publishing a living person's simulated counselor), GH-13 (projection without rights declaration), GH-14 (counsel without evidence). Each is checkable at a named phase exit above.