vault

name

vault

description

Self-writing vault — a single-inbox markdown vault for the USER'S raw project thinking (voice transcripts, quick notes, half-ideas), which Claude files, cross-links, and synthesizes on a schedule without the user. Operations: init (scaffold), process (inbox → linked notes + daily digest), synthesize (weekly themes/contradictions), health (graph pulse). Use when the user wants to set up a vault, capture a thought mid-session, process the inbox, or run note upkeep unattended. Distinct from knowledge-wiki (digests an EXTERNAL source corpus) and basic-memory (cross-project decision graph).

Self-Writing Vault

The vault holds the user's own raw thinking about this project and turns it into a living, cross-linked graph without the user's involvement: they dump thoughts into one folder; scheduled runs file, link, digest, and synthesize. The full contract (rules + layout table) lives in vault/README.md — read it once per session before operating on the vault. Invariants that hold across every operation:

• Single inlet. Only vault/inbox/ receives new capture, and only the user (or a capture pipeline) writes there. When the user says "note this down / remember this thought" mid-session, append it as a new dated file in vault/inbox/ — don't file it into notes/ directly.
• raw/ is immutable. Processing MOVES inbox originals to raw/ (date-prefixed) and never edits anything already there. Distillations live in notes/.
• Backlinks over notes. Every filed note gets ≥3 [[backlinks]], ≥1 to a note older than 60 days once the vault has that much history. A note with no connections is just a file.

This is a proactive loop (see loop-engineering): vault/log.md is its disk-based state, health is its independent grader, and vault/AUTOMATION.md holds the trigger wiring (cron / /schedule / /loop). Every operation needs only Read/Write/Edit inside vault/ — no ask-listed commands — so it survives headless claude -p runs under acceptEdits.

init

Prefer the deterministic scaffolder: run cc-vault <project-dir> if it's on PATH (--private keeps the vault out of git — ask the user which they want). Without it, create the same structure by hand: vault/{inbox,raw,notes,daily,synthesis}/ plus index.md (routing table), log.md (append-only ledger), and a README.md stating the rules above; point the user at the cc_tool templates/vault/ seeds for reference.

process (the scheduled run)

1. If vault/inbox/ has no files (ignore .gitkeep), say so and stop — this cheap no-op is what makes a daily trigger affordable.
2. Read the tail of vault/log.md (what the last runs did), then vault/index.md.
3. For each inbox file: read it; MOVE the original to vault/raw/YYYY-MM-DD-<name> unchanged; distill the content into vault/notes/ — extend an existing note when the topic already has one (prefer Edit, keep diffs small), create a new note only for genuinely new topics; apply the backlink invariant.
4. Update vault/index.md: one line per touched note.
5. Write the daily digest vault/daily/YYYY-MM-DD.md: what came in, where it was filed, links added, open questions it raised.
6. Append one dated line to vault/log.md.

synthesize (weekly)

Read only the last 7 days of daily/ digests and the notes they touched, then write vault/synthesis/YYYY-Www.md — the one file the user will actually reread: recurring themes, contradictions in their own thinking, promises they keep half-making, and what deserves attention next week. Link every claim to its [[note]]. Append a log.md line.

health (monthly-ish graph pulse)

Report, don't fix (offer fixes as a follow-up): unprocessed inbox backlog (count + age of oldest), orphan notes (no inbound [[backlinks]]), link density (links per note, compared against the last health entry in log.md), and index drift (notes missing from index.md, index lines pointing at deleted notes). The metric that matters is link density climbing — files accumulating without connections means the vault is becoming a warehouse. Append a log.md line with the numbers so the next run has a baseline.

Boundaries

Your OWN raw thinking → vault. An EXTERNAL corpus to digest once and query → knowledge-wiki. Cross-project decisions/preferences emitted while working → basic-memory. A loop's work ledger → that loop's LOG.md (vault/log.md is this loop's).