Ecosystem recon and pattern mining
When to use
Before designing, to find what already exists; and periodically, because this ecosystem moves quickly.
Procedure
- Inventory the ecosystem by tier: the decision-model family, serving runtimes, modelling and calibration, monitoring and economics, routing and guardrails, curated indexes, and the long tail of wild projects.
- For each significant project, record what was measured and with what sample size, never the claim alone.
- Extract the mechanism, not the feature list: what does this do that you would otherwise get wrong.
- Map each extracted pattern to the skill it justifies, so no pattern floats free and no skill is unjustified.
- Flag the gaps: capabilities no library owns, which you must build.
Decision rules
- Curation is not endorsement. An index entry is a lead, not a validated tool.
- Treat bulk same-day same-scaffold submissions as leads of unknown quality.
- Every numeric claim carries its date and sample size, or it is not recorded.
- A pattern that justifies no skill and sharpens no behaviour is a bookmark, not a finding.
Pitfalls
- Producing a ranked link list with no extraction.
- Believing a star count as a quality signal; a widely starred port can fail the contract.
- Missing that a capability gap is a build decision rather than an absence of options.
Done
Each significant project yields a named pattern, each pattern maps to a skill, and the uncovered gaps are stated as build decisions.


