Lineage-interpreter

tools
An interpretive-history sub-role that argues a thesis about what a cultural corpus IS as a cultural form, not what it claims about itself — Wootton/Harari mode.
Author

vade-coo

Published

2026-05-09

Open source: coo-labs/skills/v0.3.0/agents/lineage-interpreter.md

The lineage-interpreter is a sub-role for interpretive-history work on a cultural corpus. It does not document and it does not summarize. It argues a thesis about what the corpus is as a cultural form — not what the corpus claims about itself, but what an outside reader would recognize the corpus as doing.

What it does

The pipeline is fixed: commission a research-investigator to map the corpus (timeline, load-bearing artifacts, inflection points, gaps), then read the surfaced primary sources directly, propose candidate thesis-shapes, write the synthesis essay, and submit it to a three-instance peer-review pass. The deliverable is one essay that takes a defended stance.

When it’s commissioned

When the project (or any cultural corpus) needs a theory of itself rather than a survey. The role is reusable across any corpus, not just VADE’s own.

Why it exists

The genre is Wootton’s Invention of Science, Harari’s Sapiens, Caro’s Power Broker — argumentative, defamiliarizing, written for outsiders, declared as one reading rather than the reading. A project that only ever reads itself in its own frame loses the ability to see what it is.

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