| name | carry-the-residue-forward-across-sessions |
| description | Stop re-deriving from zero every session. At the close of any non-trivial work session, extract what RESISTED resolution — anomalies, reframes that failed, objections that survived, named-but-unfilled gaps, contested judgments, the unexplained core of a distillation — and persist it as the retrievable SEED for the next session. At the start of the next session, retrieve and cite it before expanding. The failure it prevents: total amnesia between sessions, where residue evaporates and nothing compounds. Triggers at session boundaries, before "I'll pick this up later", and whenever you notice you're re-discovering something a past session already surfaced. |
carry-the-residue-forward-across-sessions
The respiratory engine's whole thesis is that what carries structure forward
across breaths is the residue. Within a session it lives in context; across
sessions it dies unless it is persisted and cited before the next expansion.
This skill is that durable seed store, with the distinction the engine cares
about made executable: a session that compresses without ingesting prior
residue is a churn breath (motion without gain); a session that opens on
prior residue and resolves or seeds some of it is a metabolism breath (work
that compounds).
Organon: P31 episodic-memory + P32 variant-archive + P37 residue-seed + P30
ledger. Phase: PERSIST.
The tool
A real, stdlib-only ledger ships with the organon —
ideonomy/residue.py, scoped per topic, JSON-backed:
python3 -m ideonomy.residue --topic <topic> open
python3 -m ideonomy.residue --topic <topic> add "<text>" --kind <kind> --from <skill>
python3 -m ideonomy.residue --topic <topic> seed <id> ...
python3 -m ideonomy.residue --topic <topic> resolve <id> [--note .. | --drop | --defer]
python3 -m ideonomy.residue --topic <topic> status
python3 -m ideonomy.residue --topic <topic> close
Residue kinds map to the skills that produce them: anomaly (P-5/sensing),
failed_reframe (P-3 reverted), surviving_attack (P-4), named_gap (P-11),
contested_axis (P-9), unexplained_core (distillation), open_question.
Procedure
-
Open on prior residue. Start the session with open. It surfaces every
carried item. Read them — this is the citation that makes the breath a
metabolism, not a churn. Opening without engaging is the churn the gate
catches.
-
Seed what fuels this session. seed the residue items the current work
is actually advancing. This is P37 in action: the unexplained from last time
is the expansion seed for this time.
-
Work. Use the other premier skills. When one of them produces residue —
a reframe the MDL gate reverts, an attack that survives, a coverage gap, a
contested axis with no oracle — add it immediately with its kind and
origin, rather than letting it evaporate.
-
Close honestly. Before ending, resolve what genuinely closed,
--drop what's ruled out (with a reason), --defer accepted debt (it stays
visible in the strict/lenient gap), and close. The session is classified
metabolism or churn.
The gate
Session N+1 must retrieve and engage session N's residue before expanding.
Concretely: a session that closes having added/compressed but with zero
seeded, resolved, or adjudicated (dropped/deferred) prior items is logged as
a churn breath. The classifier is an anti-forgetting aid, not an
anti-adversarial one — a last-minute seed after unrelated work fools it;
what keeps it honest at stakes is audit (M6), not the mechanism. A run of churn
breaths means the work is not compounding — the ledger makes that visible
rather than letting it hide. The dual strict/lenient score ratchets across
sessions: strict = adjudicated/total, lenient counts deferred too, and the gap
is the accepted-debt meter.
Example
Close an ingestion session by recording the named residual gaps
(add "gov corpus uncovered" --kind named_gap --from P-11) and the unexplained
slow drain (--kind anomaly). Days later the next session opens, sees both,
seeds the gov-corpus gap as the work it's about to do, lands it, and
resolves it with a note — closing as a metabolism breath while the drain
anomaly stays open and visible for whoever picks it up. Nothing re-derived;
the residue was the bridge.