dotfiles/claude/memory/MEMORY.md

---
name: ''
metadata:
  node_type: memory
  title: MEMORY
  type: note
  permalink: claude-memory/memory
  originSessionId: 22915403-bc5d-4796-9c7d-196b7c30d2f9
  modified: 2026-08-17T13:20:44.481Z
permalink: claude-memory/memory
---

# Claude Code Memory

## Standing preferences
*Entries keep their rule inline when they fire at a moment I would not recognize as needing a lookup; they shrink to a pointer when the trigger is loud enough that I'd open the file anyway. A ⚠ constraint always travels with the workaround it limits.*

**Rules that fire silently — keep these in front of me**
- [Fowler's rules for quotation](feedback_fowlers_rules_quotation.md) — single quotes primary, double for nested, logical British punctuation order. All writing.
- [Canadian spelling in ARC prose](feedback-canadian-spelling-arc-prose.md) — centre/colour ("almost EU"). Draft all steward-voiced prose this way; corpus "center" = autocorrect drift (cleanup open).
- [Close thoroughly — no frequent deferrals](feedback-close-thoroughly-no-frequent-deferrals.md) — **frequent deferrals ARE how the cloud accumulated.** Close ALL of a block that's closable-now; for the rest, **name the specific dependency**.
- [Shorter, concentrated sessions](feedback-shorter-concentrated-sessions.md) — ONE tightly-scoped high-leverage bite taken all the way, then wrap; hold the rest as ranked horizons.
- [Constitution-as-block, then pull-based corpus](feedback-constitution-as-block-then-pull-based-corpus.md) — finish the **constitution as one block FIRST**, then corpus-into-spec **pulled by what each engine phase needs**. **Bounded question → bounded answer**; keep open-thread count LOW.
- [Removing a claim ≠ removing the reliance](feedback-removing-a-claim-is-not-removing-the-reliance.md) — cutting an unsupported sentence can **hide** the gap; the dependency survives, now invisible. Test: does the conclusion still *need* it?
- [Derive the rule from the consumer, not the survivor](feedback-derive-the-rule-from-the-consumer-not-from-the-survivor.md) — choosing between two disagreeing implementations is **selection, not derivation**. Derive from what a CONSUMER must do.
- [Rank on fields you actually write](feedback-rank-on-fields-you-actually-write.md) — a consumer ranking by an evaluative field nothing populates degrades to trivial order while claiming to rank. Verify scoring fields end-to-end; prefer signals already captured.
- [The central path — answerability, not purity](feedback-central-path-answerability-not-purity.md) — the contamination recursion is probably irresolvable, so **bind the claims, don't certify the parties**. Route by claim-type: *checkable* → produce the check + a falsifier; *judgment* → disclose standpoint in one line, decide, record; *undecidable* → name it open. **One layer, then act — never audit the audit.**
- [Notes are part of the work](feedback-notes-are-part-of-the-work-keep-footnotes-endnotes.md) — footnotes/endnotes are integral: KEEP+CONVERT (`<sup><a>`→`[^N]`), never drop on graduation.
- [One-shot instruments are proportionate](feedback-one-shot-instruments-are-proportionate.md) — a measurement answering a question **asked once** is NOT a directive violation; its counterfactual is an **assertion**, not a durable tool. The violation is **re-writing what's already banked** (rule of three → ladder). *Too few promoted*, not *too many built*.
- [A checkable question over a self-authored corpus](feedback-checkable-question-over-self-authored-corpus.md) — counting events in a record **I wrote** is self-report with extra steps. Before leaving any question: **who authored the corpus it reads, and would a different author have written it differently?** Narrow until it turns on what entries *literally say*.
- [Grounding finds my errors, not my support](feedback-grounding-pass-finds-errors-not-support.md) — **three packages running, every omission cut AGAINST my own case.** Ground in TWO passes: (1) what did I get wrong? (2) **what already says this?** Search the register for the CONCLUSION, not just the citations. ⚠ Quote from the FILE, never from the relayed message — placement adds and cuts.
- [Resurface banked notes before re-deriving](feedback-resurface-banked-notes-before-rederiving.md) · [Checkable claim surfaces bugs](feedback-checkable-claim-surfaces-bugs.md) · [Census by mechanism, not proxy](feedback-census-by-mechanism-not-proxy.md) · [Completion is a tripwire](feedback-completion-is-a-tripwire.md) · [Trust prior pass frame](feedback-trust-prior-pass-frame.md) — the five epistemic disciplines. Kernels: **read the banked note before re-deriving** · **a checkable claim over a soft classification is itself a defect-detector** · **census by RUNNING the real pipeline** · **the feeling of "done" is the cue to verify the tail** · **re-run a prior verification at the scope of your extension**. ⚠ Also carried as Symmetria §3 flags — *two surfaces, deliberately*: §3 loads only when Symmetria is invoked, so these stay here for sessions where it isn't.

**Loud trigger — pointer suffices**
- [Chamber work: ground in constitution + charter + runbook FIRST](feedback-chamber-work-ground-in-constitution-charter-runbook.md) — **any chamber work *or talk about it*** begins there (incl. `reanchor:`). Repo CLAUDE.mds are pointers, not state; corpus claims come from a self-tested tool, never a hand grep.
- [Governance files are dotfiles symlinks](reference-governance-files-are-dotfiles-symlinks.md) — Edit/Write refuse to write through a symlink, so **edit the real `~/dotfiles/…` path** when appending — **`PENDING`/`REVIEWED` only.** ⚠ That refusal is a tool artifact, **not** a permission check, and this note is the documented route past the only friction guarding the constitution (PENDING-107). **`~/CLAUDE.md`/`~/REVIEWED.md`/L2 = `[ESCALATE]`, steward's hand — a jurist sign-off does not authorize one.**
- [Verification ladder](reference-verification-ladder.md) — the named instruments; reach for the gate the claim's shape demands instead of re-deriving one. ⚠ **FROZEN — REVIEWED-123 (2026-08-17): no additions, rewordings, removals or reorderings, from ANY source, whatever its authorization**, until the trial is graded (N-now **60/84**). Entries earned meanwhile queue in **PENDING-141's owed-entries list** (4 rows). Reading it is unaffected — that is the point of the freeze.
- [Skill-harvest register](skill-harvest-register.md) — canonical home for proposed skills (governed analog of PENDING.md for tooling); `/wrap-up` §1.6 proposes, steward authorizes. **Rebuilt 2026-08-07** from the archive: **154 live proposals**, grouped by kind, each with an exact `archive:L###` pointer. ⚠ The 2026-08-01 compaction was *lossless but illegible* (55 scraped header rows, 95% of cells cut mid-word) — the count it advertised, 177, was never the number. ⚠ **THE STROKE-2 BATCH IS AUTHORIZED BUT SHOULD NOT BE EXECUTED YET — PENDING-141.** 41 rows stamped `S2` are authorized (2026-07-19, execution not a ruling) and 22 are `S2?` (unsettled). **BUT appending them triples the ladder from 20 entries WHILE a pre-registered trial is measuring whether the ladder is reached** (baseline 14%, graded at 84 transcripts). Ladder size is an uncontrolled variable in that design, so executing the authorized batch would confound the only check behind REVIEWED-95's causal claim. **⚖ RULED — REVIEWED-123 (2026-08-17): AUTHORIZED (a) HOLD, on six conditions, and the freeze is GENERAL rather than S2-specific.** Grading does NOT authorize the append — the batch returns for a *ruling*. Report **N-now at every wake** until lifted; 30-day review is a live `DEFERRED-DECISION`. ⚠ Filing new proposals now requires a **declared firing moment** (`/wrap-up` §1.6); one that cannot name it is documentation and must say so.
- [Copy-paste-clean governance drafts](feedback-governance-drafting-copy-paste-clean.md) — draft PENDING/REVIEWED blocks as plain fenced markdown; display formatting leaks into the placed record.
- [Verify-before-compose hook](feedback-verify-before-compose-hook.md) — chamber constitutional writes are BLOCKED without `<!-- GROUNDED-IN: … -->` + verbatim Grounding. Don't fight the block.
- [Tool review after each use](feedback-tool-review-after-each-use.md) — review every tool we built after each run, success OR failure. **PASS-BUT-FALSELY is the priority signal.** Log: `chamber-library/_curation/tool-evolution-log.md`.
- [Every canon doc's source lives in Chamber Sources](feedback-resolve-source-through-chamber-sources.md) — a canonical's source = whatever `resolve_archived_source` returns, **never** the master library or a path in frontmatter. Read the banked record before calling a mismatch a defect.
- [Engine sources graduate to the permanent chamber](feedback-engine-sources-become-permanent-chamber-collection.md) — work added for the engine ALSO becomes permanent collection unless stated otherwise; take it all the way (clean→verify→graduate→catalogue→sidecar). Never leave staged.
- [Bulk indexing runs in tranches, gated on READBACK](feedback-bulk-indexing-runs-incrementally-with-readback.md) — never one multi-day mine; order by criticality; **prove each tranche by reading back, not by write-success** (933k drawers once stored fine and were unreadable). Steward rule 2026-05-04, learned on MemPalace, **applies now to engine corpus work**.
- [Studium Engine charter](reference-studium-engine-architectural-charter.md) — the engine's constitutional doc. Read before building. · [Sixtus-V collaboration](feedback-studium-engine-sixtus-v-collaboration.md) — build freely, surface only vision-forks; **constraint-candidates** = 3rd governed instrument. Studium-engine only.
- [CapableHands standing authorization](reference-capablehands-standing-authorization.md) — M4 mini `david@10.0.1.136` durably authorized for remote OCR/inference; don't re-ask (steward 2026-07-01).
- [Typography palace — query via CLI](reference-typography-palace-cli.md) — ~20 type masters at `~/.mempalace/palace-chamber-typography`; `mempalace --palace <that> search "…"`. For ARC typography; don't re-ask where it lives.
- [Steward maps live in ~/dotfiles/maps](reference-steward-maps-home.md) — a **map** = an artifact David reads *directly* to orient. Write to `~/dotfiles/maps/`, symlink to Desktop, **never** straight onto the Desktop.
- [Plane coordination workflow](reference-plane-coordination-workflow.md) — CENTRAL to steward↔Seb: `app.plane.so/capablemind`, thin effort-tasks `[BM #N]` over canonical GH issues. ⚠ BBF = BetterBridge *product*, NOT the board.
- [MemPalace is an unaffiliated stopgap](mempalace-is-unaffiliated-stopgap.md) — third-party; don't conflate with BMF/CapableMind. MemPalace PRs await MemPalace's maintainers, **not Seb**.
- [The maturation of the chamber — a dialogue](~/_Dev/studium-engine/docs/the-maturation-of-the-chamber-a-dialogue-2026-06-28.md) — the 2026-06-28 exchange on the chamber's telos (fidelity-without-trust; reading-is-unsolvable-is-the-feature). Companion to [[project-studium-engine-telos-chamber-of-voices]].

## Canonical Workstream Trackers
*Read the tracker for any active workstream at /wake-up before composing the briefing. Append substantive moves at /wrap-up — to the **chronological log**, not only "current state". Per `feedback-canonical-workstream-tracker-discipline.md`.*
- **[Chamber as versioned releases](project-chamber-versioned-releases.md) — THE GOVERNING FRAME for all library work.** The 2000-year Chamber as versioned releases with soft borders, each serving a PURPOSE; scope every library bite through this. **Open decision: which purpose anchors V1.** Read the file, not this line — it holds the reframe that resolved the purpose/scope paralysis.
- [Studium Engine](project-studium-engine.md) — canonical engine tracker. **N0–N2 + R0 + `voice_stamp` built**; corpus **14 sources, trilingual**, fleet **9 suites / 285**. **fr cell all but closed** — 8 grounded (1 A + 7 B), `ratio_A_to_B` **VOID** until PENDING-134 lands. ⚠ **PENDING-131 (c) never bound the engine** (`chunker.py` has `char_range` since Cluster A). **NEXT: rule PENDING-134 — last blocker is a steward MCP restart.**
- [Studium engine telos — the chamber of voices](project-studium-engine-telos-chamber-of-voices.md) — **the ultimate goal, above the build plan**: the childhood chamber of hero-voices, rebuilt so the counsel is *accountably* theirs. Why verbatim fidelity is load-bearing.
- [The Chamber touchstone — the *why*](~/_Dev/studium-engine/docs/the-chamber-touchstone.md) — seven questions to test work against when lost in the trees. **Read at Step 0 of any chamber work.** Holds no state; does not decay.
- [The Chamber vision is NOT in one place](project-chamber-vision-is-not-in-one-place.md) — it lives in **seven** sources across two repos + memory. A single home would become an eighth unless it supersedes or points.
- [L1 reliability](project-L1-reliability.md) — canonical L1 tracker. **BLOCKED ON SEB (PENDING-94); BMF is down and staying down.** The replay **has never resumed, only restarted** (`minCursor` is a minimum over 11 modules, two never participate ⇒ every start rebuilds from seq 0). Completion is gated by **uninterrupted run length, not rate**. Recall never worked either (`retrieval_count = 0`). **Read the tracker before ANY L1 work** — walked past once on 2026-08-03.
- [Instrument censuses — have our gates ever fired?](../governance/fool/census-02-have-they-ever-fired-RESULT.md) — census 01 (has each gate a real negative instance? → **decay, not construction**, is the failure mode) + census 02 (has it fired at all? → the record divides by whether a human invokes it). Both pre-registered. **Read before trusting any gate's silence.**
- [ARC open-work register](project-arc-open-work-register.md) — **the single code-verified source of truth for what is OPEN on ARC.** Read THIS for remaining ARC work, not the chronological tracker. · [ARC](project-arc-rework.md) — chronological record; **Stage G DONE/SEALED (GPG `ac0a7ee`) — reactive mode governs.**
- [Source library — link + dedupe](project-source-library-link-and-dedupe.md) — master ebook library `~/Documents/___The Library [ePub_AWZ3]/` (2190 ebooks). GOAL: link chamber↔sources + dedupe; a real link needs EPUB/PDF internal metadata + edition-identity, **not filenames**.
- [Sidecar typology — protocol-dependent reading-indexes](project-sidecar-typology-protocol-dependent.md) — `.meta.json` structural sidecar = PROTOCOL-NEUTRAL (the graduated bar); reading-indexes = PROTOCOL-DEPENDENT and probably PLURAL — **don't design the schema yet.**
- [Character-as-image hazard](feedback-character-as-image-hazard.md) — EPUBs rendering diacritics as inline images are SILENTLY MUTILATED by image-drop. Mechanism built + wired; per-source glyph-maps still owed. **VIEW the glyph; map to SOURCE form.**
- [Making sequence source set](project-making-sequence-source-set.md) — **COMPLETE against the ReadingList** (reconciliation-verified). Sourced ≠ ingested. Read before any Making/studium source work.
- [Studium = CM's unfettered sandbox](project-studium-cm-sandbox-and-transfer.md) — experiment freely on library/engine without risking CM's runtime; breakthroughs transfer back. Steward-framed 2026-07-08.
- [Be (laundromat)](project-be-laundromat.md) — Skemantix startup (Seb+David) funding CapableMind's ladder; **bridge, not venture**. Decisions LOCKED. **Pre-revenue WTP gate = renovate Pat → charge her; no new spec until it clears ⇒ nothing for executor on be.**
- [The Fool — a local model in the fool seat](../governance/fool/input-dependence-01-PREREGISTRATION.md) — **THE ACTIVE WORKSTREAM.** Trial 09 VOID (never run); programme re-aimed from the **doctrine** question to the **deployment** question. Instrument = blind A/B arm-matching, **no sound control needed**. Log: `dotfiles/claude/governance/fool-trial-log.md`. ⚠ Its subject matter (OP-02, the fault lines) lives in **CapableMind-AI**, its instruments in **dotfiles**, and nothing in CapableMind points back.
- [Obsidian vault — from archive to practice](project-obsidian-vault-practice.md) — canonical vault tracker. **Frontmatter Spec v1.0.0 ratified + 2 passes applied** (511 edits / 268 files, pushed). ⚠ The vault is **NOT a git repo** — it mirrors to `~/_Dev/david-root-and-branch-vault-git`. **The actual goal — a capture workflow — has not been started**; don't let the frontmatter tail stand in for it.
- Chamber-typography — *tracker not yet established*; moves live in per-session memories (2026-05-11 →) + `project-chamber-cruft-restoration.md` + `project-chamber-typography-mining-plan-2026-05-15.md`.

## Active Session
> 🔑 **PULLING THREAD — THE PAPER BRIDGE. One photographed notebook page, five minutes, decisive.** If Claude cannot read the steward's hand (four languages, musical shorthand, his own abbreviations) the branch closes and we stop theorising; if it can, it changes what the alias-repair and hub-writing are *for*. ⚠ **HARD DATE OVERRIDES ON THE DAY: the beacon, 2026-08-25T12:00:00Z** (epoch-ms `1787659200000`) — run ONCE, curl, record `outputValue` BEFORE running, pass exactly as served, **stop and report on ANY failure**. ⚠ The steward said 2026-08-23 that **the Fool returns next session** — that predates the whole Obsidian afternoon and he closed with *"pick up where we left off."* **Do not silently resolve; ask.**
> 🎯 **THE VAULT IS NOT BADLY ORGANISED — IT IS UNFED.** Five doors (paper notebooks · paper marginalia · ebook highlights · work with the executor · work with the jurist) and **until 2026-08-23 none of them opened onto the vault.** 56% of 2,370 notes carry no link in or out; 45% of the vault is archive citing itself. Craig Mod's diagnosis, confirmed by the vault's OWN `CLAUDE.md`: *"the impediment had always been extracting sentences from my chaos of scribbles"* — the steward documented a morning-notebook→evening-curate workflow and **the curate step is the one that never ran.** No taxonomy fixes that.
> ⚠ **THE CHECK IS SKIPPED PRECISELY WHERE CONFIDENCE IS HIGHEST — six corrections in one session, four of them to claims made the same day.** A grep that read body text as frontmatter (239 vs 159 — *the tracker was right, the executor wrong*) · a mechanism claim naming the wrong agent · *"Claude.app has no filesystem access"* (false since 2026-08-08, PENDING-82) · a link census inflated by archive + repetition (104→**34**). ✅ **The last two were caught by testing my own findings before the steward acted on them.**
> ⚠ **THE VAULT'S `CLAUDE.md` WAS NOT READ UNTIL THE WRAP** — a named discipline in `~/CLAUDE.md`. It contained the day's best confirmation. **Steward-raised horizon: compose it properly, against measured state.** It is wrong against its own substrate today (monthly `YYYY-MM` vs the only file `2025.05.md`).
> ⏸ **UNRESOLVED, chosen silently and flagged:** monthly filename format — vault doc says `YYYY-MM`, only pre-existing file is dots, links split 13 dots / 15 dashes but **every dashed link is unresolved**. One rename settles it; steward's call.

- [Session 2026-08-23 — five doors into the vault, and none of them were open](session-2026-08-23-the-doors-were-all-shut.md) — wake-digest anchor bug cleared (**86 threads + 84 questions unreadable across 195 wraps**, `5a350c7`); reversal question answered (**22.4/active day vs 5.7 — 3.9×**, concentrated 22:2 in executor proposals); **the steward's commissioned archive script found dead since ~March behind a `>/dev/null`**, retired (`f1c91d9`); **the capture practice BUILT WITH A TRIGGER** — three prior attempts lapsed inside four weeks, none had one (`073ef8a` `7226e0d`); PENDING-155 filed.

## Historical reference → MEMORY-reference.md
Older archived-session pointers and the stable reference layer (steward profile · project-state detail · L1/L2/Chamber inventories · legacy pending-work · reference-file list) live in [MEMORY-reference.md](MEMORY-reference.md) — consult on demand; not loaded at wake. Recent cross-session trajectory comes from the Active Session entry above + the recent `session-*.md` files (wake §2.b.1).

## Index discipline (self-bounding — keep this file lean)
Wake-loaded live index; hard budget well under the harness load ceiling. Keep to: Standing preferences · Canonical Trackers *as one-line pointers* (chronological detail lives in the linked tracker files, **not** here) · Active Session · these pointers. Rotation + budget-breach handling are wired into `/wrap-up` (demote prior Active Session on promote) and `/wake-up` (truncated load = flag + trim). Back up before restructuring.
*Compaction history relocated to [MEMORY-reference.md](MEMORY-reference.md) at the 2026-08-20 wrap — pure history, not wake-critical.*