navigate-thoughts

name	navigate-thoughts
description	Resolves thoughts/ paths and navigates thought documents. Use when user references a thoughts/ path, asks to find/read/list thoughts documents, or encounters symlinks in the thoughts directory.

Navigating Thoughts

Resolve thoughts paths to canonical form and locate documents in the local thoughts directory.

Background

thoughts/ is a symlink-based directory managed by ThoughtCabinet. It points into a central thoughts git repo but is accessed locally via relative paths from the project root.

Directory structure:

• thoughts/{user}/ — Personal repo-specific notes
• thoughts/shared/ — Team-shared repo-specific notes (plans, research, PRs)
• thoughts/global/ — Cross-repository notes
• thoughts/searchable/ — Hard links for search tools (NOT canonical, never reference)

Common subdirectories under shared/:

• shared/plans/ — Implementation plans (YYYY-MM-DD-description.md)
• shared/research/ — Research documents (YYYY-MM-DD-description.md)

Workflow

1. Normalize path

   • Strip searchable/ segment: thoughts/searchable/shared/plans/foo.md → thoughts/shared/plans/foo.md
   • Ensure thoughts/ prefix (add if user gives bare path like shared/plans/foo.md)
   • If user gives a description instead of a path, proceed to search

2. Locate document

   • Exact path given: read it directly
   • Partial/fuzzy: ls the likely directory, then match by name or grep for content
   • No path given: ls -lt thoughts/shared/ thoughts/{user}/ | head -20 to show recent documents

3. Present

   • Read and present the document content
   • If the path was non-canonical (e.g. contained searchable/), note the canonical path

Rules

• NEVER reference thoughts/searchable/ paths in output — always use canonical paths
• All paths are relative to the project root (e.g. thoughts/shared/plans/..., never absolute)
• If thoughts/ doesn't exist, tell the user to run thc thoughts init
• When listing, prefer ls -lt (recent first) for discoverability