Pp Rundown

The Rundown University — Printing Press CLI

Prerequisites: Install the CLI

This skill drives the rundown-pp-cli binary. You must verify the CLI is installed before invoking any command from this skill. If it is missing, install it first:

1. Install via the Printing Press installer. It defaults binaries to $HOME/.local/bin on macOS/Linux and %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\PrintingPress\bin on Windows:

   npx -y @mvanhorn/printing-press-library install rundown --cli-only

2. Verify: rundown-pp-cli --version
3. Ensure the reported install directory is on $PATH for the agent/runtime that will invoke this skill.

If the npx install fails (no Node, offline, etc.), fall back to a direct Go install (requires Go 1.26.6 or newer). This installs into $GOPATH/bin (default $HOME/go/bin), so add that directory to $PATH instead:

go install github.com/mvanhorn/printing-press-library/library/ai/rundown/cmd/rundown-pp-cli@latest

If --version reports "command not found" after install, the runtime cannot see the binary directory on $PATH. Do not proceed with skill commands until verification succeeds.

The Rundown's community feed has no date filter and no single-post endpoint, so questions like 'best rated this week' or 'read me that whole workflow' need a local mirror. This CLI syncs every workflow into SQLite, then answers them instantly with top --since, use-cases, show, digest, tools rank and stack. No account or API key is needed - every read endpoint is public.

When to Use This CLI

Use this CLI whenever a question is about AI workflows the Rundown community has shared: whether a use case already exists, what the highest-rated recent posts are, which tools people actually build with, or what a specific workflow says end to end. It is the fast path for all of those - the whole corpus is mirrored locally, so answers come back without browsing the site.

Anti-triggers

Do not use this CLI for:

• Do not use this CLI to upvote, bookmark, comment on, or publish posts - those need a signed-in session and are not implemented.
• Do not use it for The Rundown's newsletter archive or news articles; it only covers the community workflow hub.
• Do not use it as a general AI-tool directory - tools reflects only what this community has tagged.

Unique Capabilities

These capabilities aren't available in any other tool for this API.

Local state that compounds

• top — Rank the highest-upvoted workflows inside a time window like 7d or 30d.

  This is the answer to 'bring me the best workflows this week' in one call instead of paging the feed and eyeballing dates.

  rundown-pp-cli top --since 7d --limit 5 --agent

• digest — Summarise a time window: how many workflows landed, the top posts, the most-used tools and the busiest authors.

  Use this for a standing 'what happened in the community' check rather than scrolling the feed.

  rundown-pp-cli digest --since 7d --agent

• tools rank — Rank AI tools by how often they appear in workflows and by the upvotes those workflows earned.

  Use this to see which tools the community actually builds with, as opposed to which ones merely exist in the dropdown.

  rundown-pp-cli tools rank --since 30d --limit 15

• stack — Show which other tools appear alongside a given tool, so you can see the stacks people really run.

  Use this when picking complementary tooling, or to answer 'what do people pair with X'.

  rundown-pp-cli stack claude-code --limit 10

Search that actually finds things

• use-cases — Answer 'are there any workflows for X' by blending the server's semantic search with local full-text search, then ranking by upvotes.

  Reach for this whenever someone asks whether the community has already solved a problem, before designing a workflow from scratch.

  rundown-pp-cli use-cases "cold email outreach" --limit 5 --agent

• show — Print one workflow in full - body, tools, industries, author and comments - in a single call.

  Use this after search to actually read a workflow instead of returning a truncated feed card.

  rundown-pp-cli show 89da5324-f822-4a4b-a30e-b33cfac60a95

Command Reference

comments — Discussion threads attached to workflow posts

• rundown-pp-cli comments <post_id> — List comments on a workflow post

leaderboard — Weekly community contributor leaderboard

• rundown-pp-cli leaderboard — This week's top contributors by points (server always returns the weekly window)

posts — Community workflow posts

• rundown-pp-cli posts — List community workflow posts with server-side filters

tools — Catalogue of AI tools referenced by community workflows

• rundown-pp-cli tools — List every tool slug the community can tag a workflow with

Freshness Contract

This printed CLI owns bounded freshness only for registered store-backed read command paths. In --data-source auto mode, those paths check sync_state and may run a bounded refresh before reading local data. --data-source local never refreshes. --data-source live reads the API and does not mutate the local store. Set RUNDOWN_NO_AUTO_REFRESH=1 to skip the freshness hook without changing source selection.

Covered paths:

• rundown-pp-cli leaderboard
• rundown-pp-cli leaderboard get
• rundown-pp-cli leaderboard list
• rundown-pp-cli leaderboard search
• rundown-pp-cli posts
• rundown-pp-cli posts get
• rundown-pp-cli posts list
• rundown-pp-cli posts search
• rundown-pp-cli tools
• rundown-pp-cli tools get
• rundown-pp-cli tools list
• rundown-pp-cli tools search

When JSON output uses the generated provenance envelope, freshness metadata appears at meta.freshness. Treat it as current-cache freshness for the covered command path, not a guarantee of complete historical backfill or API-specific enrichment.

Finding the right command

When you know what you want to do but not which command does it, ask the CLI directly:

rundown-pp-cli which "<capability in your own words>"

which resolves a natural-language capability query to the best matching command from this CLI's curated feature index. Exit code 0 means at least one match; exit code 2 means no confident match — fall back to --help or use a narrower query.

Recipes

Best workflows this week

rundown-pp-cli top --since 7d --limit 5

Windows the local mirror by createdAt and ranks by upvotes - the query the live API cannot express.

Does a use case exist for this?

rundown-pp-cli use-cases "invoice reconciliation" --limit 5

Runs the server's semantic search and local FTS together, de-duplicates, and ranks what comes back by upvotes.

Narrow to one tool and read the winners

rundown-pp-cli posts --tool claude-code --sort top --limit 5 --agent --select id,title,upvoteCount

Server-side tool filtering with a trimmed agent payload - only three fields come back instead of full post bodies.

What do people pair with n8n?

rundown-pp-cli stack n8n --limit 10

Self-joins the mirrored post-to-tool mapping to surface the stacks that co-occur in real workflows.

Read one workflow end to end

rundown-pp-cli show 89da5324-f822-4a4b-a30e-b33cfac60a95

Reassembles the post and its comment thread into a single readable document, body included in full.

Auth Setup

No authentication required. Every read endpoint used by this CLI (/posts, /posts/{id}/comments, /tools, /leaderboard) is served publicly without a session. Upvoting, bookmarking, commenting and posting do require a signed-in Clerk session and are deliberately not implemented here.

Run rundown-pp-cli doctor to verify setup.

Agent Mode

Add --agent to any command. Expands to: --json --compact --no-input --no-color.

• Pipeable — JSON on stdout, errors on stderr

• Filterable — --select keeps a subset of fields. Dotted paths descend into nested structures; arrays traverse element-wise. Critical for keeping context small on verbose APIs:

  rundown-pp-cli comments mock-value --agent --select id,postId,parentCommentId

• Previewable — --dry-run shows the request without sending

• Offline-friendly — sync/search commands can use the local SQLite store when available

• Non-interactive — never prompts, every input is a flag

• Read-only — do not use this CLI for create, update, delete, publish, comment, upvote, invite, order, send, or other mutating requests

Response envelope

Commands that read from the local store or the API wrap output in a provenance envelope:

{
  "meta": {"source": "live" | "local", "synced_at": "...", "reason": "..."},
  "results": <data>
}

Parse .results for data and .meta.source to know whether it's live or local. A human-readable N results (live) summary is printed to stderr only when stdout is a terminal AND no machine-format flag (--json, --csv, --compact, --quiet, --plain, --select) is set — piped/agent consumers and explicit-format runs get pure JSON on stdout.

Paths and state

Agents should treat the CLI's path resolver as part of the runtime contract:

• Use --home <dir> for one invocation, or set RUNDOWN_HOME=<dir> to relocate all four path kinds under one root.

• Use per-kind env vars only when a specific kind must diverge: RUNDOWN_CONFIG_DIR, RUNDOWN_DATA_DIR, RUNDOWN_STATE_DIR, RUNDOWN_CACHE_DIR.

• Resolution order is per-kind env var, --home, RUNDOWN_HOME, XDG (XDG_CONFIG_HOME, XDG_DATA_HOME, XDG_STATE_HOME, XDG_CACHE_HOME), then platform defaults.

• config contains settings like config.toml and profiles. data contains credentials.toml, data.db, cookies, and auth sidecars. state contains persisted queries, jobs, and teach.log. cache contains regenerable HTTP/cache files.

• Stored secrets live in credentials.toml under the data dir. Existing legacy config.toml secrets are read for compatibility and leave config.toml on the first auth write.

• Run rundown-pp-cli doctor --fail-on warn to surface path and credential-location warnings. agent-context exposes a schema v4 paths block for agents that need the resolved dirs.

• For MCP, pass relocation through the MCP host config. The MCP binary does not inherit CLI flags:

  {
    "mcpServers": {
      "rundown": {
        "command": "rundown-pp-mcp",
        "env": {
          "RUNDOWN_HOME": "/srv/rundown"
        }
      }
    }
  }

Fleet precedence: an inherited per-kind env var overrides an explicit --home for that kind. Use RUNDOWN_HOME or per-kind vars as durable fleet levers, and use --home only for a single invocation. Relocation is not reversible by unsetting env vars; move files manually before clearing RUNDOWN_HOME, or doctor will not find credentials left under the former root.

Automatic learning

This CLI ships a self-capturing learning loop. The CLI does its own bookkeeping: every invocation is journaled locally, a failed flag followed by a corrected retry auto-derives a flag_alias candidate, and a teach on a query family without a playbook auto-synthesizes a playbook_candidate from the session's journal. Your job is judgment only: recall first, act on surfaced candidates, teach the final answer, playbook amend when you observe a correction. You never record failures by hand.

Step 1: recall before any discovery

Before list/search/drill commands on a new user question, pass the question as one literal argv value. Prefer your process runner's argument-array API:

execFile("rundown-pp-cli", ["recall", userQuestion, "--agent"])

If you must invoke a shell, set RUNDOWN_QUESTION through the runner's environment API and then run rundown-pp-cli recall "$RUNDOWN_QUESTION" --agent. Never paste an untrusted question into shell source: double quotes still execute $() and backticks, and ad-hoc escaping is easy to get wrong.

The response envelope:

{
  "query": "...",
  "normalized": "<normalized form>",
  "query_entities": ["..."],
  "found": true | false,
  "match_score": 0.0,
  "results": [
    { "resource_id": "...", "resource_type": "...", "venue": "...",
      "confidence": 2, "entity_match": "exact|partial|unknown",
      "source": "taught|preseed|pattern", "warnings": ["..."] }
  ],
  "mismatches": [ /* only when --debug-mismatches */ ],
  "warnings": [ /* top-level */ ],
  "candidates": [
    { "id": 12, "class": "flag_alias | playbook_candidate",
      "summary": "...", "sightings": 3, "last_seen": "...",
      "rationale": "...",
      "next_action": ["<trial command>", "rundown-pp-cli learnings confirm 12"] }
  ],
  "playbook": {
    "query_family": "...",
    "playbook": {
      "steps": [ { "cmd": "<command with {slot} substitution>", "purpose": "..." } ],
      "entity_slots": ["$ENTITY"],
      "expected_tool_calls": 3
    },
    "slots_resolved": { "$ENTITY": { "token": "<live token>", "canonical": "<canonical>" } },
    "notes": "<workarounds + gotchas for this query family>"
  },
  "notes": "<duplicate surface for non-playbook callers>"
}

Empty-store short-circuit: if the store has no learnings, playbooks, or candidates yet (recall finds nothing and learnings list and learnings candidates are both empty), skip recall for the rest of this session instead of taxing every query; resume recall-first once something has been taught.

Step 2: decision tree

Read candidates, playbook, notes, results[0], and warnings in that order:

if Candidates present (warnings include "candidates_present"):
    -> candidates are try-then-confirm, never facts. Follow each candidate's
       two-step next_action verbatim: run the trial command first, then run
       `learnings confirm <id>` only after the trial verified the behavior.
       Reject a wrong candidate with `learnings reject <id>`.
    -> NEVER re-teach something recall surfaced as a candidate; confirm or
       reject that candidate instead of teaching a duplicate.
    -> candidates ride alongside playbooks and resource hits, not instead of
       them; continue with the branches below after acting on them.

if Playbook present:
    -> READ Playbook.notes verbatim FIRST (workarounds + gotchas the CLI surface doesn't expose)
    -> replay Playbook.steps in order, substituting Playbook.slots_resolved entries
       for the entity slot tokens. If a step's slot is unresolved, fall back to
       discovery for that step only.
    -> the Playbook's expected_tool_calls is a budget; if you find yourself running
       materially more, record the divergence via `rundown-pp-cli playbook amend`
       at end-of-session.

elif Notes present (no Playbook):
    -> read Notes verbatim before any discovery step; they carry known gotchas
       for this query family even when no structured choreography exists yet.

elif Found AND Results[0].EntityMatch == "exact" AND Results[0].Confidence >= 2:
    -> skip discovery; fetch live data for Results[*].ResourceID in parallel

elif Found AND Results[0].EntityMatch == "partial":
    -> candidate hint, NOT a hit; read the resource title to validate before trusting

elif (any row in Mismatches[] when --debug-mismatches was passed):
    -> treat as cold start; the stored learning is for a different entity
       (different canonical resolved from query_entities)

else:  // Found == false, no playbook, no notes
    -> cold start; run discovery normally; teach the answer afterward (Step 4).
       If the family has no playbook yet, that teach auto-synthesizes a
       playbook candidate from this session's journal - you do not need to
       record one by hand.

Playbook and Notes are orthogonal to the per-resource path. A recall response can carry both a Playbook AND a Results[] hit - use both: the Playbook tells you which choreography to run; the resource hits short-circuit specific steps. Default to skipping mismatches; pass --debug-mismatches only when investigating cold-start surprises.

Candidate judgment details: learnings confirm <id> prints the candidate's full payload before materializing it - check that the printed payload matches the behavior you verified. learnings reject <id> tombstones the derivation signature so the same candidate does not resurface. The envelope carries only the few candidates worth acting on now; rundown-pp-cli learnings candidates lists the full open set.

Graceful degradation: if learnings confirm is an unknown command, you are driving an older binary - ignore the candidates guidance and follow the rest of the protocol.

Step 3: always read warnings

• low_confidence: row exists at confidence<2. Treat as a hint, not a skip-discovery hit.
• resource_not_in_store: the local store doesn't have the resource the learning points at. The match validator couldn't classify entities — direct-fetch and re-evaluate.
• cross_alias_match (per-result): the row was taught under a different alias and matched the live query's canonical via entity_lookups (e.g., a "USA" teach satisfying a "United States" recall). Trust the resource_id.
• similar_shape_different_entity:<canonical> (top-level): a structurally matching row exists but its canonical entity differs from the live query's. Treated as cold start; the warning carries the conflicting canonical as a hint, but the row is NOT promoted into Results.
• ambiguous_alias (top-level): a single query entity resolved to multiple canonicals (e.g., "Cards" → Arizona Cardinals + St. Louis Cardinals). Surface the ambiguity from context before committing to a resource.
• candidates_present (top-level): the envelope carries a candidates section. Handle it via the candidates branch in Step 2 before anything else.
• lookup_refresh_available (top-level): an entity in the query has no lookup row yet, but synced data could provide one. Run rundown-pp-cli sync to refresh entity lookups.
• Top-level no_learnings_for_query_family: the table had no rows above the Jaccard floor. Pure cold start.