Ethan has ~800 custom tools and multiple evaluator agents that already mine graveyards, half-lives, and sprawl — but nothing tells him when a NEW tool he's about to build already exists in spirit. This hooks tool creation itself: whenever a new executable lands in ~/.claude/tools (or bin), it compares the new script's purpose against existing tool names/docstrings and whispers back the 3 closest ancestors, with a one-line 'why yours differs?' prompt to his tablet.
Create ~/.claude/tools/tool-ancestry-whisper (bash, ~80 lines). Trigger: a systemd path unit watching the tools dir for new files, or a PostToolUse hook in ~/.claude/settings.json matching Write where file_path is under a tools dir. On fire: extract the new tool's first comment block + name, build a corpus of existing tool names plus their leading comment lines (head -20 of each executable), and pipe both to `llmq` (already present) with a prompt asking for the 3 nearest existing tools and whether the new one is a duplicate, a variant, or genuinely new. Write the verdict as a card into ~/Tablet/ via tablet-sync, and log to ~/.claude/state/tool-ancestry.jsonl so tool-sprawl-sentinel and idea-debt-ledger can read it. Only whisper when the verdict is duplicate/variant — silence when genuinely new.