read_brief.py

The brief writer's reading tool, revision v32-brief-r1.

What it holds

Verbs header, titles [n] [--day d] [--offset N], sample [n], thread ID [--offset] [--limit], item ID [--offset] [--limit], state and evidence. Bodies come from the adjacent brief_corpus.jsonl. Every response is bounded (at most 18,000 characters) and every served span is logged in character offsets. sample draws item excerpts from the least-read active days first. evidence writes out/evidence.json, the coverage receipt. There is a reference budget and a hard ceiling at three times it.

Who writes it, and when

The instrument's author. newbrief.py copies it into brief/; the brief writer calls it.

Why it exists

"The writer must never open either corpus directly." The brief writer asks "what is ordinary here", so its verbs sample for breadth across the week, where the coder's read.py serves triage windows. The receipt lets a reader "calibrate a description" whose coverage it can see.

Where

read_brief.py.

Checked against: read_brief.py, CONTRACT-brief-writer.v32.md, TOOLS-SPEC.md