What problem does it solve? Teams building plugin systems, app marketplaces, or developer platforms reinvent decisions that Shopify, VS Code, Slack, WordPress, and Chrome settled years ago, because the public evidence for those decisions is almost never systematically gathered. This Skill runs one assignment of a structured prior-art survey — a vocabulary map, one search angle, one mechanism extract record, or the final decision index — with every query, zero result, and absence recorded so the evidence is reproducible. ## Core Features & Use Cases - Vocabulary map minting: Defines platform slugs, mechanism vocabulary with vendor synonyms, and per-angle applicability verdicts before any searching begins. - Recorded search angles: Executes one of seven search angles across developer documentation, marketplace policies, declarative contracts, migration history, isolation models, and complementor forums, recording every query verbatim with coverage cells per source. - Extract records and decision index: Reads one mechanism from one platform into a validated extract record, then cuts the corpus across nine lenses into a decision index a build phase consumes directly. - Schema-gated validation: Every artifact is validated by a bundled Python script against JSON schemas, with exit codes distinguishing artifact findings from unusable runs. - Use Case: Before designing an extension API for your SaaS product, run the survey to produce a decision index showing how comparable platforms structured manifest fields, revenue shares, review gates, and migration timelines, each row backed by verbatim evidence quotes. ## Quick Start Use platform-ecosystem-prior-art-survey to run the vocabulary-map assignment for our planned plugin marketplace and produce a validated platform-vocabulary-map.yaml.
