David F GliddenandClaude Opus 5
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Two loose ends closed before the Harrison re-gate, both surfaced by the steward. Memory pointers. Six links in MEMORY.md / MEMORY-reference.md pointed at files that all existed, via hand-counted relative depths that resolved from neither of the memory dir's two addresses (it is ~/dotfiles/claude/memory, symlinked from ~/.claude/projects/…). The wake canary detected this correctly FOUR times over two days and the banked remedy was to change the canary's path resolution — i.e. to silence a true positive. The defect was never the pointers: the alarm emitted one undifferentiated word, MISSING, so every firing had to be re-diagnosed by hand and the cheapest re-diagnosis is always "known bug". wake-digest.py now reports four outcomes (ok / mis-authored / dead / non-portable), hands back the exact replacement, and carries a regression control replaying this bug's shape. Pointers are home-anchored (~/…), not absolute — steward's correction; absolute hardcodes this machine into the repo whose purpose is surviving a machine change. Maps. With the noise gone, one genuine dead pointer surfaced: arc-current-state-2026-05-07.md, a live ARC dashboard the steward read to orient. It lived only on the Desktop and went with a tidy-up. A census found four more in the same condition, zero copies anywhere — including the Making-Sequence architecture and reading list, load-bearing for current corpus work. The cause is structural: code, session records and memories are durable; the one artifact class addressed to the steward had no home. All five now live in maps/ and are symlinked back to their exact Desktop paths (Desktop view unchanged), moved under a checksum gate with a positive control. wake-digest.py reports stray Desktop maps; it never moves them — the Desktop is the steward's. How to verify: python3 scripts/wake-digest.py --selftest # 28 controls, PASS python3 scripts/wake-digest.py | grep -A3 'MEMORY POINTERS' cd ~/Desktop && shasum -a 256 *.md # reads through the symlinks What was not changed: ~/CLAUDE.md and REVIEWED.md untouched (Constraint #1). No Desktop file was deleted or renamed. MEMORY-reference.md's May entry is marked superseded, not rewritten. Known limitation: maps/ has no successor for the ARC map's FUNCTION — the open-work register carries the content, but nothing exists that the steward can open and orient by. Named in the entry rather than quietly closed. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WuMjg3ipEVa3n8CoSzoyvc
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name, description, metadata
| name | description | metadata | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| reference-steward-maps-home | Maps — artifacts the steward reads directly to orient — live in ~/dotfiles/maps (git-tracked) and are symlinked to the Desktop; write them there, never straight onto the Desktop. |
|
A map is an artifact addressed to the steward and read directly by him: a current-state dashboard, a corpus index, a reading list, an architectural sketch, an audit he opens rather than asks about. Distinct from session records (written for the next session) and memory files (written for the next Claude) — David does not browse the memory dir, so a map filed there is a map that is not read.
Home: ~/dotfiles/maps/ (git-tracked, pushed with dotfiles). Each map is
symlinked back to its original Desktop path, so the Desktop is unchanged — same
names, same place. Tidying the Desktop now deletes a symlink, not the map.
The rule: write a map into ~/dotfiles/maps/ and symlink it to the Desktop —
never the other way round. A map authored straight onto the Desktop is untracked
from the moment it exists.
Enforcement: wake-digest.py reports any top-level Desktop .md that is not
a symlink into maps/ (stray_maps()/is_homed(), 3 controls). It reports only
— the Desktop is the steward's, and nothing moves without him.
Why it exists: arc-current-state-2026-05-07.md was a live ARC dashboard the
steward read to orient. It lived only on the Desktop, went with a tidy-up, and
its only trace was a MEMORY-reference.md link that read as noise for three
months — I nearly deleted it as a stale pointer. The census then found four
more in the same condition (Making-Sequence architecture + reading list among
them, load-bearing for live corpus work), every one with zero copies anywhere.
The cause was structural: code, session records and memories were all durable,
and the one artifact class addressed to the person the system is for had no
home. Steward-directed 2026-07-28; all five relocated byte-identically under a
checksum gate with a positive control.
Related: feedback-resurface-banked-notes-before-rederiving (the register that holds ARC's content successor is project-arc-open-work-register; the map's function — something he opens and orients by — had no successor until this).