[FIX] Repair 39 files' frontmatter — including 3 I damaged an hour earlier

The 2026-06-06 normalization sweep (3f9a89b, 283 files) prepended a stray
permalink-only frontmatter block to 39 memory files, 20 of them session wrap
records. Any real frontmatter parser reads the FIRST block, gets `permalink`
alone, and never sees name/description/type.

The sharp case: `strip_frontmatter` exists specifically to stop thread extraction
from matching inside `description:` — its docstring says so. On those 20 wrap
records it strips the stray block and hands the real frontmatter back AS BODY,
producing exactly the condition it was written to prevent.

Repair merges permalink into the real block and drops the duplicate. Nothing
retyped: frontmatter and body are carried as slices, body md5 asserted unchanged.

TWO DEFECTS OF MY OWN, both found only after claiming success:

1. THREE FILES DAMAGED BY THIS SESSION'S OWN STAMPING COMMIT (ef6fa94). That
   script located frontmatter with a non-greedy `^---\n.*?\n---\n`, which on a
   stray-block file matches the STRAY block — so it appended superseded_by to the
   wrong block and orphaned the real frontmatter into the body. That is the same
   non-greedy-first-block blindness diagnosed in strip_frontmatter one hour
   earlier, reproduced in the tool written to clean up after it.
   And the post-stamp check reported "malformed: none" because it asked "does the
   file start with frontmatter then a banner" — true for all three — while the
   claim was "the stamp preserved the record's metadata". The control's subject
   was adjacent to the claim's, for the sixth time today and the first time in my
   own verification. Repaired, verified against the pre-stamp file from git: no
   key lost, prose preserved.

2. REPAIRING 20 APRIL-MAY WRAP RECORDS MOVED THEIR MTIMES TO TODAY, and
   `sec_pause` picked "newest wrap" by mtime — so the digest promoted an April
   session to `Last wrap` and lost both the pulling thread and the open question.
   Caught by the DEGRADED section, which is the honest-degradation mechanism doing
   its job. `sec_pause` now selects by git add-time, like `wrap_events`. Residual
   stated in the comment: add-time lags the wrap by hours, so `Last wrap` is an
   upper bound — wrong by hours where mtime was wrong by months.

Verified after: 0 two-block patterns, 0 orphaned frontmatter, 16 stamps intact
with name: present, 381 pointers resolve, 0 dead, selftest PASS, drift clean,
digest reports 0 degraded sections and the correct last wrap.

Not defects: context-discipline.md and relational-gap-analysis.md use the
`title:`/`type: note` convention and have no `name:` — flagged by my check, correct
as they stand.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_013Y6t6qx7cpaCu5xGdD36u4
This commit is contained in:
David F Glidden
2026-08-17 19:49:02 +02:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent ef6fa94dcd
commit c2df868104
43 changed files with 65 additions and 179 deletions
@@ -1,12 +1,9 @@
---
permalink: claude-memory/feedback-mempalace-protocol-step-2-discipline
---
---
name: MemPalace protocol step 2 — query-before-responding mid-session is the discipline (not just at wake-up)
description: Surfaced 2026-04-26 evening end-of-session. MemPalace had the content that would have prevented today's structural drift; the failure was retrieval discipline, not storage. Protocol step 2 ("BEFORE RESPONDING about any person, project, or past event: call kg_query or search FIRST") is rarely honored mid-session. Discipline parallel to canonical-workstream-tracker — same shape (write to substrate, fail to read before producing), different temporal scale (mid-session, not just at boundaries).
type: feedback
originSessionId: 87dfe384-b862-4deb-9676-24e43046528f
permalink: claude-memory/feedback-mempalace-protocol-step-2-discipline
---
# MemPalace protocol step 2 — query-before-responding is the discipline