journal

name	journal
description	Record the session's progress, problems, insights and context gaps into the learning inbox (via MCP). Use when closing a session, at a checkpoint, or to document what was done.
argument-hint	optional hint about what to record

journal

Record a session snapshot — done, problems, insights and context gaps — into the learning inbox. The skill is the method (what is worth capturing); the record goes to the inbox table in Surreal via the journal tool of the inbox MCP (append-only, user stamped server-side, drained only by governance). Never write to disk.

Steps

0. Close the work before narrating it. Walk the repos this session touched — the context/ mounts (every kb is a git repo) and anything else you wrote to — and run git status on each. Uncommitted work → propose the commit to the human NOW (conventional message, one commit per subject; push is the human's call). The journal you are about to write cites those hashes as evidence — uncommitted work is memory that evaporates.

1. Analyze the session since the last checkpoint (or the start):

   • Done — what happened (use relative timestamps: "10:30", "afternoon")
   • Problems — blockers or issues that did not become frictions
   • Insights — important decisions, learnings

2. Identify context gaps — the most valuable part (it feeds governance). Read ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/context-gaps.md for the patterns (knowledge with no home, undocumented process, skill candidate, inadequate structure). For each gap: what was discovered, where it should live, which kind.

3. Assemble the record as structured markdown, in the shape of ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/format.md. Be rich here — governance reads this later.

4. Write to the inbox: call the journal tool (of the inbox MCP server) with the assembled markdown as the text argument, and origin = who you are right now — the purpose/agent acting (e.g. delivery, shell; a subagent names itself, not the shell that dispatched it). The drain reads origin to know where the learning lives. Every call is a new append (the inbox stamps user and at) — never try to find-and-update a previous one.

5. Confirm in one sentence. E.g. "Journal recorded: round 2 validated; 1 context gap." The richness goes in the record, not the reply.

Notes

• No disk. If you catch yourself reaching for Write into a journals folder, stop — the destination is the journal tool.
• If the tool is unavailable (a build without the inbox MCP / offline), say the inbox is not mounted instead of falling back to a file.
• Several journals in one session = several appends (each timestamped). That's fine.