Skill reference: briefing

Skill reference: briefing

The briefing skill authors one document genre: a one-page briefing or standup update — Headline, What’s New, Why It Matters, What’s Next / Asks — for a recurring audience that already holds context and needs the delta fast. This reference describes what that document type is, how the skill produces one, when it earns its place, and the provenance behind it.

Property	Value
Authors	A one-page briefing / standup update
Purpose group	Business communication
MIF conceptType	episodic
Target MIF level	3
Primary source	Harness-native pattern (no external body prescribes a “briefing” format)

What this document type is

A briefing is a terse status update anchored to a specific coverage period — “since the last update” — not a durable statement of fact. It carries a Headline (the single most important thing to know right now), a compressed “What’s New” of 2 to 4 delta items, a paired “Why It Matters” line for each, and a “What’s Next / Asks” naming concrete next actions and owners. No named external standard (ISO/NISO/ANSI/APA) governs this shape; it is harness-native.

That coverage-bound nature is exactly why the genre’s conceptType is episodic rather than semantic. A briefing does not assert a standing fact about the world the way an ADR or an engineering report does — it reports what happened in a bounded window, addressed to a reader who already holds the backdrop and will read the next one next week. Its truth value is scoped to that window (temporal.validFrom / validUntil), and it is superseded, not amended, by the next period’s briefing. That is the same time-bound logic that puts changelog in an episodic-adjacent posture, though a changelog is anchored to release versions rather than a standup cadence.

How the skill produces one

briefing is a genre skill: it carries the one-page-briefing pattern as durable instructions plus exemplars, and writes the artifact over a MIF floor so the result is at once a scannable status update and a machine-conformant unit.

• Pattern, made operational. The skill encodes the four-part structure — Headline, What’s New, Why It Matters, What’s Next / Asks — and enforces that every “What’s New” bullet is paired with a “Why It Matters” line; an update with no stated implication is treated as incomplete.
• A hard ceiling, not a suggestion. The one-page limit is enforced by cutting to the delta — the freshest, most decision-relevant items win over restated background — while still accounting for everything the briefing draws from rather than silently dropping thin or uncertain items.
• Exemplars set the bar. Like every genre in the suite it ships templates/good-l1.md (the MIF Level-1 floor), templates/good.md (the Level-3 target), and templates/bad.md (a counter-example: “What’s New” bullets with no paired “Why It Matters” — orphan updates the reader has no way to weigh).
• MIF projection. The document is authored with MIF frontmatter (via the shared mif-frontmatter substrate) and a conceptType of episodic, with temporal validity carrying the coverage period. mif-validate proves the Markdown to JSON-LD round-trip is lossless.

When it is beneficial

Reach for briefing for a standup, a sync, or a regular stakeholder update where the audience already holds the backdrop and needs the delta and the next action, fast — not a re-explanation of standing context.

Per the skill’s own anti-triggers, do not use it for:

• A longer, standalone summary of a larger document for a reader who does not already hold context — that re-establishes background rather than assuming it, and isn’t bound to a recurring cadence or a “since last update” delta.
• A curated, versioned history of released changes — that is changelog: entries are anchored to release versions, not to a standup cadence.
• A single already-made technical decision with its rationale on record — that is adr: immutable and driver-and-outcome shaped, not a status delta.

Example

A weekly briefing titled “Payments Platform Migration — Weekly Briefing” covers 2026-06-23 to 2026-06-30. Its Headline states the cutover is still on track for July 14 with one legacy batch job as the sole open blocker. What’s New reports a staging load test passing at 2x peak volume, the EU Stripe webhook migration completing, and the legacy nightly reconciliation batch job still failing intermittently. Why It Matters pairs each: the load test confirms no capacity add is needed before cutover, the EU migration de-risks the highest-volume merchant segment, and the batch job is the only item that can still slip the date. What’s Next / Asks names concrete owners and dates: the platform team root-causing the batch failure by Thursday, a Finance go/no-go call by Friday, and the US merchant migration starting the following Monday contingent on EU staying stable for a full week.

Provenance & citations

• Genre source — harness-native pattern: no external standards body prescribes a “briefing” format; the pattern is the skill’s own encoded structure (Headline / What’s New / Why It Matters / What’s Next / Asks) with no domain standard to conform to beyond common practice.
• Skill provenance: authored by the briefing skill in the mif-docs plugin, https://github.com/modeled-information-format/mif-docs-plugin; the skill’s exemplars define and verify the pattern.
• MIF conformance: the document projects to canonical JSON-LD under the MIF specification, https://mif-spec.dev, and is proven lossless by mif-validate.
• Index: this skill is one entry in the skills by purpose catalog, in the business-communication purpose group.