Reachability

Most feeds ask: "is this one of your interests?" That's a filter, and filters narrow until you only ever see what you already follow. skope asks a different question: does a causal path reach you? That's a lens — it broadens without dissolving into random noise.

The test

brazil rate hike → EM outflows → dollar strength → TSLA valuation → you (you hold TSLA). Reachable.

a Brazilian's daily life → … no path to your money, work, or country. Excluded.

Same country, same region — but only one has a chain that lands on you. Reachability keeps the first and drops the second. A topic you've never searched for can still reach you; a topic adjacent to your interests can still be irrelevant.

The rule / LLM split

This is the heart of skope's architecture. Reachability is computed in two stages with a hard boundary between them:

1. The rule seed (skope, deterministic). skope stores only the ReachabilitySeed: which axis matched, which entity, the match type, and the strength. This is rule-based, reproducible, and lives in the ledger.
2. The causal narrative (Claude, stateless). At brief time, Claude renders the human-readable chain — brazil rate hike → USD strength → TSLA valuation — from that seed. It is generated fresh each time and never persisted.

The seed is the deterministic anchor; the narrative is disposable synthesis. skope never stores LLM-generated prose in the ledger — that keeps the ledger honest and the scoring reproducible.

Where the seed comes from

Reachability is scored against your profile axes — the few dimensions along which the world can actually touch you:

• asset — your holdings, currencies, sectors you're exposed to
• career — your employer, industry, the companies in your orbit
• knowledge — your stack, the tools and standards you build on
• location — where you live, and the Tier-2 outlets that cover it

Each article is matched against the entities and keywords on those axes. A match produces a seed with a strength; the impact score is a deterministic function of the seed plus the source's trust tier. No path, no seed, no radar.

Why it's a lens, not a filter

A filter shrinks your world toward your stated interests until it becomes an echo chamber. A lens keeps the aperture wide — anything with a causal path qualifies, even from a domain you'd never think to follow — while still refusing the genuinely irrelevant. That's the whole point of skope: news that reaches you, not news you already asked for.

See also: Concentration, the companion watcher that warns you when even your reachable news collapses onto too few axes.