Ran 15-way blinded comparison (5 topics x 3 versions). CROSS won all 5 topics
(4.74/5.0 avg vs HN 4.10, Base 3.73). Then improved CROSS further:
- dedupe.py: hybrid similarity (token+trigram Jaccard) at 0.40 threshold,
cross-source links went from 3 to 13 items across 5 topics
- render.py: [xref: HN5, HN4] -> [also on: HN, Reddit] for human-readable tags
- youtube_yt.py: SYNONYMS dict so "hip hop" matches "rap" (0.33 -> 0.71 score)
- SKILL.md: instruction #7 tells Claude to lead with cross-platform signals
Validation: improved CROSS scores 4.38/5.0 vs original 3.98 (+0.40), wins 4/5
topics. Biggest gains in specificity (+0.8) and format compliance (+1.0).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Matt Van Horn
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