PolicyEngine research lookup Skill

PolicyEngine research lookup

Find existing PolicyEngine articles to cite as evidence or to model tone against. PolicyEngine has published ~185 articles — US and UK policy analyses, model/methodology notes, and org announcements. Paths below are verified against the policyengine-app-v2 mirror.

Where posts live

In policyengine-app-v2:

Article bodies (plain markdown, some Jupyter .ipynb): app/src/data/posts/articles/<filename>
Post index (title, description, date, tags, authors, image): app/src/data/posts/posts.json
Author records (slug → name/bio): app/src/data/posts/authors.json

Article files are plain markdown — metadata is not in per-file YAML frontmatter. Each post's title, date, tags, and authors live in posts.json, keyed to the article's filename; the authors field holds slugs that resolve in authors.json. A posts.json entry:

{
  "title": "How we used Claude Code to apply for the Public Benefit Innovation Fund",
  "description": "Treating writing as software development...",
  "date": "2025-08-28",
  "tags": ["us", "org", "ai", "featured"],
  "authors": ["max-ghenis"],
  "filename": "policyengine-atlas-pbif-grant.md",
  "image": "policyengine-atlas-demo.png"
}

A post's public URL is policyengine.org/<country>/research/<filename-without-extension>.

Lookup recipes

POSTS=~/PolicyEngine/policyengine-app-v2/app/src/data/posts

# Full-text search article bodies for a topic
grep -rli "child tax credit" "$POSTS/articles/" | head

# Search titles/descriptions in the index
python3 -c 'import json;[print(p["date"],p["filename"]) for p in json.load(open("'"$POSTS"'/posts.json")) if "eitc" in (p["title"]+p.get("description","")).lower()]'

# Filter by tag (e.g. everything tagged "featured" or "uk")
python3 -c 'import json;[print(p["date"],p["title"]) for p in json.load(open("'"$POSTS"'/posts.json")) if "featured" in p.get("tags",[])]'

# Most recent posts
python3 -c 'import json;[print(p["date"],p["title"]) for p in sorted(json.load(open("'"$POSTS"'/posts.json")),key=lambda p:p["date"],reverse=True)[:10]]'

Prefer these recipes over any hardcoded list — the corpus changes weekly, so a static index of filenames goes stale. Search live, then cite the exact filename and date you found.

Frequently cited proof points

Verified filenames worth knowing (confirm current framing in the index before quoting):

| Topic | filename | Use for | |---|---|---| | UK government adoption | policyengine-10-downing-street.md | credibility, state capacity | | US state tax coverage | state-tax-model-beta.md | federal + 50-state reach | | Grant-writing with AI | policyengine-atlas-pbif-grant.md | tooling, org velocity | | US federal proposals | harris-ctc.md, harris-eitc.md | CTC/EITC analysis depth | | UK fiscal events | autumn-budget-2024-employer-nic-pension-contributions.md | budget/manifesto costing |

Related skills

policyengine-writing — match the tone and neutrality standard of published posts.
policyengine-us / policyengine-uk — for "do we cover program/state X?" answer from the model, not just the blog.

Agent Skills: PolicyEngine research lookup

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