Reviewing Candidates

Reviewing Candidates

Candidates are the raw per-session captures in the Skills tab → Sessions sub-view. Some are feedstock for Recommended; others are on a countdown to promoting themselves. For the full picture of how the tabs fit together — and which candidates take which road — see How It Works and The Skills Tab.

A candidate row can disappear on its own

If the same trajectory keeps recurring, its success count climbs every time it’s captured again. Once that count reaches skillSynthesis.successesToPromote (default 3) and the candidate clears the judge and the safety gates, it promotes itself — no click required. The row moves to promoted whether or not you ever opened it. Reviewing here is how you get ahead of that, not a gate that’s waiting on you.

Statuses

Status	Meaning
candidate	Captured, awaiting review, clustering, or the direct-promotion threshold
promoted	Live in the Library as ~/.ptah/skills/<slug>/SKILL.md — by you, or on its own
rejected	Dismissed — kept on record so identical trajectories aren’t re-captured

Each row also shows success and failure counts — a high failure ratio is a hint that the capture isn’t actually a good skill, and it’s also the counter direct promotion watches.

Manual actions

From a Sessions row:

• Promote — force-elevate a single candidate straight to the Library right now, without waiting for the success threshold. Runs through the same judge and gates as automatic promotion — it just skips the wait.
• Reject — remove it from the clustering pool and stop it accumulating toward direct promotion (optionally with a reason). There’s no hard delete — the row is kept without its body so the same trajectory won’t be re-captured.
• Select a row — drills into the invocation history that produced it, so you can audit what Ptah noticed.

Tip

If you want to see something before it can reach your library unattended, Reject obvious noise early (e.g. subagent transcripts) rather than waiting for it to either cluster into a low-value recommendation or quietly cross the promotion threshold.

RPC surface

For automation or A2A scenarios, the same actions are exposed as RPC methods:

Method	What it does
skillSynthesis:listCandidates	List candidates with current state
skillSynthesis:promote	Manually promote a candidate to a skill
skillSynthesis:reject	Mark a candidate as rejected
skillSynthesis:listSuggestions	List the cluster-distilled Recommended skills
skillSynthesis:getSuggestion	Fetch one recommendation’s full body
skillSynthesis:updateSuggestion	Edit a pending recommendation before accepting
skillSynthesis:acceptSuggestion	Accept a recommendation into the Library
skillSynthesis:stats	Aggregate counts (candidates, promoted, etc.)

Tip

If a promoted skill is misbehaving, you can edit SKILL.md directly — the file is yours. Re-saving in place keeps it active without re-triggering the promotion pipeline.