Reachability

Relevance is a causal path that reaches you, not a keyword match. This is the idea skope is built around.

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.