| name | vault-concepts |
| description | Maintain canonical concept pages and surface recurring themes |
Concepts
Promote recurring themes into canonical concept pages and keep concept
navigation coherent.
Portent reference: ../references/portent-knowledge-base-spec.md.
Recency Priority
Work the active surface newest-first, ranked by each object's updated
frontmatter date (fall back to file modification time when updated is absent).
Concentrate scrutiny on the freshest material — recently-touched objects are
where active thinking lives and where new mismatches, overlaps, and gaps appear.
Long-untouched objects are assumed settled and rank lower, but are never
excluded: they remain valid link targets, merge destinations, and canonical
homes, and still get a structural check (broken links, orphaning).
Weight theme detection toward recent notes so emerging themes surface early, but
keep temporal spread as the high-confidence signal: a concept still needs
occurrences across time, not just a recent burst.
Purpose
Maintain notes/concepts/ as the durable vocabulary of your vault. Surface
cross-domain patterns and decide when transience deserves permanence.
Concept pages are Portent Topic objects. New recurring-theme pages should use
type: Topic, status: organized, and explicit related_to links to the
Projects, Notes, Events, or Responsibilities they help explain.
Parameters
--topic TOPIC focus on specific theme (optional)
--mode report|apply (default: report)
Thresholds for New Concept Creation
Only create new concept pages when ALL are true:
- Theme appears in 3+ unrelated notes
- Evidence is concrete and linkable
- Destination concept is clear
- Destination Topic object is clear
- Change is additive and low-risk
Workflow
- Scan: Read active surface (
notes/, ideas/, projects/) for recurring
themes
- Detect: Extract patterns across unrelated notes:
- Phrases/metaphors that recur
- Principles or mental models
- Unresolved questions with traction
- Filter: Remove false positives:
- Deliberate tag repetition
- Common filler phrasing
- Same-project-only repetition
- Cluster: Group related patterns and rank by confidence
- Decide per candidate:
- Update existing concept page
- Merge near-duplicate concept pages into one canonical concept
- Create new concept page (if thresholds met)
- Defer (insufficient evidence)
- Normalize: Rewrite transient note references to point to canonical
concepts
- Refresh: Update
index.md when concept navigation changes
- Log: Append concise operation entry
Confidence Rubric
- High: 3+ unrelated notes with temporal spread
- Medium: 2 unrelated notes with strong conceptual overlap
- Low: Weak recurrence or same-domain concentration
Apply Behavior
- report: List candidates only, no changes
- apply: Update existing concepts; merge high-confidence duplicates; create
new ones when thresholds met
Merge Rules
Merge concept pages when they name the same principle, mental model, or durable
vocabulary item. Do not merge broad neighboring concepts just because they are
often linked together.
- Choose the clearest, most established page as canonical.
- Preserve distinct examples, open questions, and source links from merged
pages.
- Rewrite links from merged pages to the canonical concept.
- Keep aliases when alternate names are likely search terms.
- Report medium-confidence concept overlaps instead of merging them.
Safety
- Prefer updating existing concepts over creating near-duplicates
- Never delete notes or archive content
- Never merge concept pages that represent different decisions or levels of
abstraction
- Never modify raw/, processed/, or assets/
- Confirm before creating new concept pages
Output
Return:
- Concepts created/updated/proposed (with confidence)
- Concepts merged/proposed for merge
- Topic object metadata added or updated
- Evidence links used
- Reference normalization performed
- Index/log update status
- Recommended follow-up actions