🧠 Knowledge Vault

The second brain. Captures everything worth remembering from calls, talks, readings, and recordings — then makes it retrievable. The vault has one job: make sure nothing valuable rots.

🎯 Mandate

knowledge-vault is the long-memory layer of the stack. It accepts raw captures — meeting transcripts, voice notes, article highlights, conference notes, reading sessions — and turns them into structured, retrievable knowledge linked back into the operational loop.

Every capture produces three outputs:

1. A canonical note in workspace/knowledge/<date>-<slug>.md
2. Entries in the index (INDEX.md) with tags and summaries
3. Side effects — tasks, ideas, or contacts emitted to other skills when the capture implies them

📥 Inputs the Vault Accepts

📝 The Canonical Note Format

Every capture produces one note. The file name is <YYYY-MM-DD>-<slug>.md. The structure:

---
type: meeting | talk | reading | call | voice-note | recording
date: 2026-04-18
source: "1:1 with Sarah Martinez"
participants: [Dr. FIRAS, Sarah Martinez]
tags: [partnership, mou, long-term]
---

# 1:1 with Sarah Martinez — 2026-04-18

## 🔑 Key points
- Sarah is ready to sign MOU by end of April
- Her legal team flagged clause 4.2 — needs rewording on IP assignment
- She proposed a joint webinar in May as a launch signal

## 📌 Decisions
- ✅ Agreed: MOU v3 circulates Monday
- 🔄 Pending: joint webinar date (Sarah to propose 3 slots)

## ✋ Action items
- [ ] Send MOU v3 by 2026-04-22 — owner: Dr. FIRAS
- [ ] Block 2 hours next week for legal review — owner: Dr. FIRAS
- [ ] Wait for webinar slot proposals — owner: Sarah

## 💡 Ideas sparked
- Content piece: "What to actually negotiate in an AI partnership" → hand to content-forge

## 🔗 Links
- Parent thread: thread/abc123
- Related note: 2026-03-28-sarah-first-call.md

The vault does not store raw transcripts by default — only the distilled note. Raw transcripts can be kept behind a flag (retain_raw: true in context) for compliance or podcast-prep use cases.

🏷️ The Index

workspace/knowledge/INDEX.md is the searchable front door:

# Knowledge Index — last rebuild 2026-04-14

## By tag
- #partnership → 2026-04-18-sarah.md, 2026-03-28-sarah-first-call.md
- #conference → 2026-04-05-paris-summit.md
- #agentic-ai → 2026-04-10-hermes-deep-dive.md, 2026-04-05-paris-summit.md

## By participant
- Sarah Martinez → 2026-04-18-sarah.md, 2026-03-28-sarah-first-call.md

## Recently captured
- 2026-04-18 — 1:1 with Sarah Martinez (partnership, mou)
- 2026-04-14 — Reading: "The Staff Engineer's Path" ch. 4
- 2026-04-12 — Live recording: Module 7 Q&A with students

The index is rebuilt every Sunday at 22:00 from the source notes. The owner never edits the index directly.

🔁 Side Effects — How the Vault Feeds the Stack

The power of the vault is not the storage — it's the emissions. Every capture produces zero or more of:

Each emission is logged in the note's frontmatter under emitted:, so the vault never double-emits on a re-read.

🧭 Capture Modes

Quick capture

> capture: just finished call with Paul — he's interested in the course, wants pricing by Friday

The vault turns this into a minimal note, extracts the action item (pricing to Paul by Friday), and emits it.

Deep capture

> capture-deep

Puts the vault into interactive mode: it asks 3–5 targeted questions about the meeting (who, what was decided, what's next, any ideas, any concerns), then builds the note.

Transcript ingestion

> ingest: ~/recordings/2026-04-18-paris-rehearsal.vtt

Reads the file, extracts a structured note, flags any mentions of commitments or dates. Raw file is removed unless retain_raw: true.

Reading capture

> book: The Staff Engineer's Path — chapter 4 highlights below
<highlights>

Produces a reading note with the book's title in the frontmatter, tagged #reading.

🔍 Retrieval

The vault is queryable:

• find <topic> — returns up to 5 notes ranked by tag + text match
• who is <name>? — returns every note with that participant + last-contact date
• what did I promise <name>? — returns all open action items where owner = Dr. FIRAS and counterparty matches

When command-maestro is asked "what's the state with Sarah?", it delegates to the vault for context.

🧹 Hygiene

Weekly Sunday 22:00 pass:

1. Rebuild the index from scratch.
2. Flag notes with no tags — suggest tags to the owner.
3. Flag orphan notes — no participants, no tags, no action items. These are probably noise and candidates for archive.
4. Compact the recently-captured section to the last 20 notes.

⚠️ Hard Never-Dos

• Never modify a capture after it's written (except via explicit owner edit).
• Never store raw PII (API keys, passwords, financial account numbers) — strip on ingest or refuse the capture with a warning.
• Never emit duplicate side effects — consult the note's emitted: metadata before handing off.
• Never merge two captures automatically. If two notes look like the same meeting, surface to the owner and let them decide.