Local ingest

Local Ingest

Onboard a changelog without dispatching the remote fetch path. The remote path (releases admin source fetch → POST /v1/workflows/update → the API worker's DeterministicUpdateWorkflow, #1946) runs the body→records extraction server-side (incremental Haiku or the tool-loop) and bills that inference — even when it writes zero releases. A local Claude Code agent is already a capable model with web-fetch + file tools, so it can do the per-page extraction inline (folded into the session you're already in) and only needs a deterministic write path.

Core principle: the agent is the extractor. You fetch, you parse, you structure the records, and you POST them to the batch endpoint, which does a plain idempotent upsert with no AI on insert. The remote extraction loop never runs.

Local Claude Code only. This skill uses the Agent tool for sub-agent fan-out and assumes a persistent local filesystem and the CLI's RELEASES_API_* env. It sits alongside seeding-playbooks as a local-only operator skill — it is not deployed to the managed-agent fleet.

Cost contract

State this explicitly to the operator before a large run, and honor it:

• Spends: your agent's own tokens for fetch + extract, plus any sub-agents you fan out (your choice of model — sonnet for quality, haiku for bulk).
• Does NOT spend: no server-side extraction (the update workflow's incremental-Haiku / tool-loop passes), no remote web_fetch extraction. POST /v1/workflows/update is never called.
• The batch endpoint runs no AI on insert — no summarization, no marketing classifier, no feed enrichment. It does an insert plus a fire-and-forget vector embed (waitUntil). The AI fields (title_generated / title_short / summary) are intentionally left empty; see Manual enrichment below for the deliberate follow-up paths.

The negative signal that confirms no remote run happened: in Axiom releases-cloudflare-logs there is no POST .../fetch?sessionId=det-… and no extract-deps-worker event for the source.

When to use

• Onboarding a new source (or backfilling an existing one) interactively in Claude Code and you want to skip the remote extraction cost.
• A remote fetch burned a full extraction loop and wrote 0 releases (the Conductor / large-body / max_tokens failure mode) — extracting inline sidesteps the loop entirely.
• The page is fetchable by your own web tools (the refusal below is a policy gate, not a fetch limit).

When NOT to use:

• You're in a managed-agent session. This is local-only (Agent-tool fan-out + local filesystem + CLI env). MA sessions should keep using the normal fetch path.
• The source has a clean, content-rich feed. Just add it (managing-sources) and let the cron pipeline fetch it. Local-ingest is for cases where the agent doing the extraction inline is the right tool, not a replacement for feed/GitHub adapters.
• The publisher opts out (preflight refuses — see Step 1).

Workflow

Step 1 — Preflight (mandatory safety gate)

Run the opt-out check before fetching or writing anything:

bun .claude/skills/local-ingest/preflight.ts <url> --json

It fetches robots.txt (following apex→www redirects), parses the Cloudflare Content Signals policy, and gates on exit code:

Exit	Verdict	Action
0	proceed	Permissive or absent — continue.
1	refuse	ai-input=no declared. STOP. Surface to the user. Do not fetch or write.
2	unknown	Couldn't fetch/parse robots.txt. Retry once; if still unknown, surface to the user — don't assume proceed.

The gate is on ai-input only. Local ingest is search/input ingestion — feeding a search index — which is exactly what ai-input governs. ai-train=no opts out of model training, a use this path doesn't perform, so ai-train=no alone (e.g. vercel.com) correctly proceeds.

This is the Conductor lesson. conductor.build serves Content-Signal: ai-train=no, search=yes, ai-input=no — its org/source already sits paused in the registry for exactly this reason (releases admin playbook conductor). A local onboard must not silently spend tokens or ingest content against a publisher opt-out. conductor.build must be refused (via its ai-input=no) — it is the regression target for this gate.

The refusal is a policy choice, not a technical limitation: web_fetch and CF Browser Rendering can still retrieve these pages (only Cloudflare's /crawl endpoint hard-enforced the signal for Conductor). Honor the opt-out anyway. Override only with explicit publisher permission documented by the operator — there is no silent bypass.

The preflight also prints any Sitemap: URLs from robots.txt — keep them for Step 3.

Step 2 — Resolve target

Ensure the org and source exist before writing — releases attach to a source_id. Defer to managing-sources for create/naming/primary rules and to finding-changelogs for whether a structured feed exists (if it does, prefer the normal pipeline). Then:

• Read the org playbook for parse hints: releases admin playbook <org> (see managing-sources → Playbooks).
• Capture the sourceSlug and the src_… id from the created/resolved row — you need one of them for the batch URL.

If the source is brand-new, create it (e.g. releases admin source create "<name>" --url <url> --org <org> [--primary]) but do not trigger a fetch — that would dispatch the remote update workflow you're trying to avoid.

Step 3 — Map pages

Classify the page shape (releases admin discovery evaluate <url> --json reports pageStructure: single-page | index | unknown):

• Single-page changelog → one fetch in Step 4.
• Index → detail → enumerate the per-release URLs. Prefer /sitemap.xml (the preflight surfaced it) filtered to the changelog path; otherwise parse the index HTML for per-release links.
• Client-rendered index → the index is a JS shell whose cards load via a client-side fetch, so curl/non-JS scrape returns zero entries. Enumerate by rendering: drive the index with Claude in Chrome (or fan out a rendering sub-agent), paginating if the list is windowed, and collect the per-release links. Then check whether the detail pages are statically rendered — they often are even when the index isn't — and if so bulk-curl those directly (HTML→markdown locally, no render, no AI bill). Harvey's help.harvey.ai/release-notes is exactly this: client-rendered index, static detail pages. Don't conclude "no releases" from an empty non-JS scrape of the index.

Cap to a recent window (default ~25–50 most-recent releases) and log what you skipped — never silently truncate. Re-runs are idempotent, so a deeper backfill later just adds rows.

Step 4 — Fetch + extract

Reuse the parsing-changelogs conventions for type/version/date/media (see Parity below).

• A few pages: fetch and extract inline in this agent.
• Many pages: fan out parallel sub-agents — one URL-slice each, each returning records in the batch schema. Use the Agent-tool dispatch pattern from seeding-playbooks (and superpowers:dispatching-parallel-agents for the fan-out discipline). Do not fetch release URLs in the parent agent — delegate to keep the parent's context clean.
• Parent-saves caveat: sub-agents may be blocked from making the batch write (permission limits). Plan for it — have each sub-agent return its records in its result, and let the parent (you) do the writes in Step 5. Same pattern seeding-playbooks uses for note-saving.
• Extract media — don't ship text-only. Pull the images/video out of each release body and populate media, unwrapping _next/image / _vercel/image optimizer wrappers to the underlying CDN URL (normalizeMediaUrl from packages/rendering/src/media-url.ts). A text-only first pass is a common miss caught only on operator review (Harvey shipped text-only, then had to re-extract _next/image → cdn.sanity.io and re-seed); the enrichment re-POST is mode: "upsert-content" (Step 5).

Each record must match the batch schema (see Step 5) and the parity rules.

Optional — deterministic extraction (Approach A, monorepo only): instead of extracting by hand you can call the production extract libs in packages/adapters/src/extract/ — extractFromBody, extractWithTools, runDirectFetchExtraction. ExtractDeps.cloudflare is nullable and repo can be a noop, so they run with just an Anthropic key (proof: scripts/smoke-toolloop.ts). This trades agent tokens for direct Anthropic-API tokens but reproduces the production tool-loop exactly. These packages are private: true — reachable from the monorepo only, never the thin CLI. The default remains Approach B (the agent is the extractor).

Step 5 — Write (batch upsert)

POST records to the batch endpoint in chunks (~50/request keeps requests bounded; the handler does the D1 bind-limit chunking server-side):

# Use the org-scoped path. The bare /v1/sources/:slug form accepts ONLY a typed
# `src_…` id — a human slug there returns 400 bare_slug_rejected (slugs are
# org-scoped, #690). With a typed id the bare form also works:
#   POST $RELEASES_API_URL/v1/orgs/<orgSlug>/sources/<sourceSlug>/releases/batch
#   POST $RELEASES_API_URL/v1/sources/<src_…>/releases/batch
curl -sS -X POST "$RELEASES_API_URL/v1/orgs/<orgSlug>/sources/<sourceSlug>/releases/batch" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $RELEASES_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d @chunk.json   # { "releases": [ … ] }

Per-release fields (the real accepted shape — workers/api/src/routes/sources.ts, postReleasesBatchHandler):

{
  "version": "1.4.0", // optional; omit/null for date-headed or blog sources
  "title": "Dark mode", // required
  "content": "Markdown body…", // required
  "url": "https://…/changelog/dark-mode", // optional but ALWAYS populate — it's the dedup key
  "contentHash": "…", // optional
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-30", // optional; ISO-8601 (see Parity)
  "media": "https://…/shot.png", // optional
  "type": "feature", // optional; "feature" | "rollup"
  "prerelease": false, // optional
}

• Idempotent. Upserts on UNIQUE(source_id, url), fill-don't-clobber: on collision it only backfills content/media when the stored row is empty, so a re-run never overwrites a good row. Safe to re-run and to page — same url updates rather than duplicates.
• Enrichment re-POST (mode: "upsert-content"). Because the default is fill-only, re-POSTing richer content for a URL that already has content is a no-op — the stub stays. For a deliberate second pass (seed index summaries first, then full detail-page bodies + media), add "mode": "upsert-content" at the top level of the batch body: it overwrites content/media on a same-URL collision and skips the scrape title-dedup pre-filter (#1526). Use it only for intentional enrichment; the default path stays fill-only so a routine re-fetch can't clobber. The url must be identical to the seeded row — enrich keys on URL, so a changed URL scheme inserts a duplicate instead. If the URL scheme changed, re-seed instead: releases release delete --source <src_…> --hard then a fresh /batch (default mode).
• Auth. Requires write scope; the static RELEASES_API_KEY (root) satisfies it. .env autoloads RELEASES_API_URL + RELEASES_API_KEY in this repo.
• No AI on insert (see Cost contract).

Chunking helper (reads a records.json array, posts in batches of 50):

bun -e '
const orgSlug = process.argv[1], sourceSlug = process.argv[2], file = process.argv[3];
const all = JSON.parse(await Bun.file(file).text());
const base = process.env.RELEASES_API_URL, key = process.env.RELEASES_API_KEY;
for (let i = 0; i < all.length; i += 50) {
  const releases = all.slice(i, i + 50);
  const res = await fetch(`${base}/v1/orgs/${orgSlug}/sources/${sourceSlug}/releases/batch`, {
    method: "POST",
    headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${key}`, "Content-Type": "application/json" },
    body: JSON.stringify({ releases }),
  });
  console.log(`chunk ${i / 50}: ${res.status} ${(await res.text()).slice(0, 200)}`);
}
' <orgSlug> <sourceSlug> records.json

Step 6 — Validate

releases tail <slug> --json   # or: get_latest_releases (typed tool)

Confirm releases have non-empty titles, dates, content, and media. If a row is empty, fix the extraction and re-run — the default upsert backfills empty rows safely. If a row already has thin-but-non-empty content (e.g. an index-summary stub you now want to replace with the full body), a plain re-run is a no-op — use the mode: "upsert-content" enrichment re-POST from Step 5.

Recovering a source, not onboarding one? This step only confirms what got written — it says nothing about what didn't. Before telling anyone a source is "recovered" or "nothing is missing," see backfilling-sources → Before declaring a source "clean" or "recovered" for the required live-page spot check.

Step 7 — Playbook note

Record how this source was ingested so future agents don't re-derive it. Via manage_playbook (action update_notes) or releases admin playbook <org> --notes-file -. Note that the source was locally ingested (not on the cron path yet), its observed cadence, and any extraction quirks. Follow the managing-sources playbook-authoring rubric (imperative voice, keep-test, ### Fetch instructions / ### Traps / ### Coverage). Don't restate metadata the header already carries.

Parity requirements

Local output must match production shape so the source can later be picked up by the normal pipeline with no cleanup:

Axis	Rule
type	feature vs rollup per parsing-changelogs → Classifying Rollups. Leave unset/feature by default.
version	Real version string, or omit. Pre-clean <UNKNOWN> / n/a placeholders — the batch path does not strip them (the single-insert path does, server-side).
publishedAt	ISO-8601. Approximate from month/quarter/year headings rather than omit (parsing-changelogs → Dates): month → first of month, etc.
media	Unwrap _next/image / Vercel optimizer wrappers before storing — use normalizeMediaUrl from packages/rendering/src/media-url.ts.
url	Always populate. Dedup relies on a stable per-release url; without it the upsert can't collapse re-runs.

Manual enrichment (out of scope for /batch, but available)

The batch path intentionally omits title_generated / title_short / summary and org overviews. When an operator wants them, set them deliberately, case by case:

• Per-release override: PATCH /v1/releases/:id accepts summary, titleGenerated, titleShort, composition, version, … and re-embeds when content/title/AI-fields change.
• At insert time (alternative to /batch): the single-release insert POST /v1/sources/:slug/releases accepts summary? / titleGenerated? / titleShort? — use this path instead of /batch when you want enrichment set in the same write. It also strips <UNKNOWN>/n/a versions server-side.
• Bulk AI enrichment after the fact: bun scripts/generate-release-content.ts --orgs=<slug>.

Common mistakes

• Skipping the preflight. It's the first step for a reason — silently ingesting an opt-out source is the exact failure this skill exists to prevent. conductor.build must be refused.
• Silent truncation. Capping the window is fine; not telling the user what you skipped is not.
• Missing url. Breaks idempotency — re-runs duplicate instead of upserting.
• Triggering a fetch on the new source. releases admin source fetch / manage_source action fetch starts the remote update workflow (billed server-side extraction) — the cost you're avoiding. Create the source, then write via /batch.
• Fetching detail pages in the parent agent during fan-out. Delegate to sub-agents; keep the parent context clean.
• Using this for a clean feed source. Add it and let cron fetch — don't hand-extract what the feed adapter handles for free.
• Running it in a managed-agent session. Local Claude Code only.

Related skills

• finding-changelogs — is there a feed/GitHub source that makes local-ingest unnecessary? Page-structure evaluation.
• managing-sources — create org/source, naming, primary, playbook authoring.
• parsing-changelogs — the extraction conventions you must match (type, dates, rollups).
• seeding-playbooks — the parallel Agent-tool dispatch + parent-saves pattern reused in Step 4.
• superpowers:dispatching-parallel-agents — fan-out discipline for the many-pages case.