Cookbook

Ten worked patterns — light to hard. Each one is a real, runnable command. The CLI has them built in:

tabstack recipes           # browse all ten
tabstack recipes 6         # one recipe, copy-paste ready
tabstack recipes 6 --json | jq .command   # agents use this form

The menu

#	Recipe	Heat	Verbs
1	Hacker News, but typed	🟢	`extract`
2	Docs → context	🟢	`extract`
3	The price tag	🟢	`extract`
4	Changelog roulette	🟢	`generate`
5	The star drift detector	🟡	`extract`
6	The citation machine	🟡	`research`
7	CI for facts	🟡	`generate`
8	The geo sleuth	🟡	`extract`
9	Forms with a conscience	🔴	`automate` + `input`
10	The post that fact-checks itself	🔴	all of them

Heat guide

🟢 Light — one command, no dependencies, copy-paste and run. Good starting points.

🟡 Medium — shell loops, jq filters, file redirection. Assumes comfort with Unix pipelines.

🔴 Hard — multi-step pipelines, browser automation, human-in-the-loop. Treat these as templates to adapt.

Why these ten

Everything composes because of three rules: data → stdout, progress → stderr, JSON when piped. Your old friends jq, cron, and && do the rest.

For thirty years the deal with search engines was: you type, they list, you click, you copy. These recipes break that deal. A programmable search engine returns answers with citations, JSON shaped like your schema, or a finished browser session. The web stopped being a place you visit and became a standard library you call.