ECC/skills/ito-basket-compare/SKILL.md

name, description, metadata

name	description	metadata
ito-basket-compare	Compare Itô prediction-market baskets against a user's knowledge base, portfolio notes, financial context, watchlist, or research thesis. Use for read-only basket comparison and gap analysis without investment advice or live trading.	origin ECC

Itô Basket Compare

Use this skill for requests such as “compare this basket with my research,” “basket vs watchlist,” “run a gap analysis,” or “find conflicts and stale assumptions.” It compares a basket, theme, or market set with user-provided or explicitly selected context. It is read-only and never recommends or executes a trade.

Non-negotiable boundaries

• Do not advise the user to buy, sell, hold, hedge, lever, allocate, or size.
• Do not prepare or submit an order, trade, purchase, reservation, or RFQ.
• Do not run ecc ito find: despite its name, it submits an authenticated RFQ.
• Do not claim that ecc ito status returns basket data; it reads RFQ and procurement status. Do not use ecc ito evals for basket comparison.
• Do not use private documents, financial context, memory, or account data unless the user explicitly identifies the source for this comparison.
• Never print, echo, log, persist, or expose an API key, device token, session token, or secret. Never put credentials in arguments, files, or chat.
• If an operation could change external state, stop with UNSUPPORTED_OPERATION. A later confirmation cannot turn this read-only skill into an execution skill.

Inputs and access

Accept either a pasted basket or an explicitly authorized read-only source. The minimum basket input is a stable basket_id or basket label plus one or more underliers. Each underlier should contain underlier_id, label, event or claim, and any weight/probability supplied by the source. The comparison target must be user-provided or explicitly selected; request missing material instead of searching private stores broadly.

Record provenance for every input:

• source_type: user_provided, public, or ito_authenticated
• source_uri: a non-secret URL/identifier, or null for pasted material
• retrieved_at: UTC RFC 3339 time at retrieval
• as_of: source observation/publication time, or null when unknown
• freshness_status: fresh, stale, or unknown

Never label anonymous product data ito_authenticated; use public. ECC's real CLI/MCP surface does not expose a basket-read command: the CLI supports login, validation-only auth, find, status, and evals; MCP exposes ito_auth, ito_find, and ito_status. Therefore authentication success proves identity only, not basket-data availability. Prefer the documented public product-data routes when they satisfy the comparison; otherwise ask the user to paste/export the basket or use a documented keyed read with the minimum scope.

The canonical product-data surfaces are:

• Anonymous, rate-limited GET routes at https://itomarkets.com, including /api/baskets/bootstrap, /api/baskets/{basket_id}/bootstrap, and /api/markets/hot. These are valid live product reads without a private key.
• The keyed developer API at https://itomarkets.com/api/v1. Send a configured public API key only as Authorization: Bearer <key> to that exact HTTPS origin. Basket reads use GET /baskets, GET /baskets/{basket_id}, and their documented GET-only child routes and require baskets:read. Market lookup uses GET /markets/search, GET /markets/{market_id}, and documented GET-only market-data child routes and requires markets:read. Never use a write scope, dashboard automation key, cookie, or compute device credential as a substitute.
• The official Python SDK package ito-markets, imported as ito, for typed basket and market reads. Before using it, record the installed version and verify the requested method, response type, origin, and required scope. Do not install or upgrade it without confirmation.

Use an anonymous route when it supplies the basket, underliers, and current quote fields needed by the comparison. Use the SDK or keyed API only for a documented field absent from public data. Validate the response contract before comparison and record the endpoint, response Date, source observation timestamp, access mode, SDK version when applicable, and cache headers.

The verified anonymous catalog source is the GET-only endpoint https://itomarkets.com/api/baskets/bootstrap?stream=1. Basket detail uses https://itomarkets.com/api/baskets/{basket_id}/bootstrap?stream=1. Require HTTP 200, contractVersion: ito.public_basket_read.v1, and a parseable generated_at. Require a baskets array for catalog responses; require basket, underlyers, charts, metrics, and commentary objects for detail responses. Record the URL, response Date, generated_at, Cache-Control, Age, Last-Modified, and any x-ito-edge-cache value. Treat an edge stale marker as stale provenance even when generated_at is recent. Do not send credentials to this public endpoint, follow cross-origin redirects, or silently accept a changed contract version.

First-run authentication handoff

Resolve a concrete basket-read source and its authentication contract before requesting authentication. The public catalog/detail endpoints require no login and are sufficient for comparisons whose required fields they contain. If no authenticated basket-read source/tool is configured, use public or pasted input and do not request compute credentials.

ecc ito auth --json is an optional, validation-only compute identity probe. It does not start login and cannot unlock basket reads. Use it only when the user explicitly requests compute-account identity validation in addition to the basket comparison; never present it as basket-source authentication.

For a concrete authenticated basket source whose documented contract explicitly uses the canonical Itô device credential (the public /api/v1 does not):

1. Run ecc ito auth --json only if that source contract requires the same identity. This is validation-only and never starts login.
2. On missing, expired, or confirmed revoked credentials, pause and return AUTH_REQUIRED or AUTH_REVOKED. Tell the user to run ecc ito login; it performs device authorization, opens the verification page by default, and stores the device token in macOS Keychain. ecc ito login --no-browser suppresses the browser handoff. ECC itself performs no browser automation.
3. Preserve a secret-free resume summary containing the originating task/agent, user request, selected input identifiers, and completed read-only steps.
4. After the user reports completion, return to the originating agent and run ecc ito auth --json once more. Resume only the original read-only request; never broaden scope because login succeeded.

ITO_API_KEY may be forwarded by compute auth only when already configured. Do not read or display its value. The canonical Itô client is a separately installed, currently unpublished dependency configured by an explicit absolute ECC_ITO_CLI_EXECUTABLE; ECC does not discover it through PATH. If absent, return AUTH_REQUIRED with installation guidance from ito-compute, without inventing a successful auth result.

Deterministic normalization and comparison

For the same normalized input and the same explicit comparison time, produce the same output.

1. Copy inputs; never mutate source objects. Normalize text with Unicode NFKC, trim it, collapse internal whitespace, and use case-folded text only for matching. Preserve display text.
2. Convert timestamps to UTC RFC 3339. Treat missing/unparseable as_of as null with freshness_status: unknown; never substitute the current time. Reject non-finite numbers and probabilities outside [0,1]. Do not infer missing weights.
3. Deduplicate only exact normalized underlier_id values. If duplicate records disagree, retain the first record after provenance ordering and add a conflict; do not silently merge facts. Sort underliers by normalized underlier_id, then label. Sort sources by source_type, source_uri, as_of, and retrieved_at, with null last.
4. Use the user's freshness threshold when supplied. Otherwise use 24 hours for market/basket observations and 30 days for notes/research. Compare as_of with the explicit comparison time: older is stale, within threshold is fresh, and absent/unparseable is unknown. State the freshness threshold.
5. Match by exact stable ID first, then exact normalized claim/event text. Do not use fuzzy similarity as proof. Classify an item as:
   • match: same claim/direction and compatible horizon;
   • conflict: opposing claim, incompatible horizon, or duplicate ID with inconsistent facts;
   • missing: no target evidence for that underlier;
   • stale: otherwise relevant target evidence outside its threshold.
6. Keep mixed-source disagreement visible. Sort every result array by underlier_id, then evidence source_uri. Use explicit null for unknown scalar fields and empty arrays for no findings.

Recovery and safe failure

• Missing/invalid fields: INVALID_INPUT; identify fields without echoing sensitive content.
• Missing/expired credentials required by a concrete basket source: AUTH_REQUIRED; provide that source's documented handoff. Use AUTH_REVOKED only when the source confirms revocation. A generic 401 is not proof of revocation. A 403/insufficient read scope is AUTH_FORBIDDEN; do not retry or broaden scope.
• Timeout/network/5xx/malformed response: SOURCE_TIMEOUT; make at most one read-only retry when the user-specified deadline permits. Never replace a failed live read with mock or stale data while calling it live.
• 429: honor a valid Retry-After within the user deadline; otherwise stop as SOURCE_TIMEOUT. Do not loop indefinitely.
• Required stale data: return STALE_SOURCE as blocked unless the user explicitly accepts the displayed timestamps for informational comparison. Even then, preserve freshness_status: stale.
• Unsupported CLI/tool or any state-changing request: UNSUPPORTED_OPERATION.

Partial results use status: blocked, retain only source-backed partial arrays, and include incomplete: true plus the applicable error. They must never be presented as a successful complete comparison.

Output contract

Default to concise Markdown in this order: basket summary, comparison target, provenance/freshness, matches, conflicts or stale assumptions, missing context, and a user-action checklist containing research questions only. When structured output is requested, emit JSON with stable key order and no extra keys:

{
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "status": "ok",
  "comparison_time": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z",
  "basket": {"basket_id": "example", "label": "Example", "underliers": []},
  "target": {"label": "Research notes", "source_type": "user_provided"},
  "sources": [],
  "freshness_thresholds": {"market_hours": 24, "research_days": 30},
  "matches": [],
  "conflicts": [],
  "stale_assumptions": [],
  "missing_context": [],
  "checklist": [],
  "disclaimer": "This comparison is informational and not investment or trading advice."
}

Blocked output uses the same leading key order and contains no fabricated data:

{
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "status": "blocked",
  "incomplete": true,
  "error": {"code": "AUTH_REQUIRED", "message": "Read-only Itô authentication is required.", "retryable": true},
  "resume": {"originating_agent": "current", "completed_steps": []},
  "disclaimer": "This comparison is informational and not investment or trading advice."
}

Allowed error codes are AUTH_REQUIRED, AUTH_REVOKED, AUTH_FORBIDDEN, SOURCE_TIMEOUT, STALE_SOURCE, INVALID_INPUT, and UNSUPPORTED_OPERATION.

Always end human-readable output with exactly:

This comparison is informational and not investment or trading advice.