📋 Mission Ledger

The single source of truth for everything you've said yes to. If it's not in the ledger, it doesn't exist. If the ledger says it's done, it's done.

🎯 Mandate

mission-ledger owns the canonical task file: workspace/tasks/current.md. Every task that enters the autopilot's awareness — captured from email, from a voice note, from a call summary, from a direct owner prompt — lands here. The ledger is the authoritative state; no other skill maintains a parallel task list.

🗂️ The Canonical Format

workspace/tasks/current.md uses this exact structure. Deviating breaks other skills.

# Mission Ledger — <YYYY-MM-DD>

## 🔥 Today
- [ ] [P1] Review Q2 partnership draft — due 2026-04-18 — source: thread/abc123
- [ ] [P2] Record intro for module 7 — due 2026-04-18 — source: manual

## 📅 This Week
- [ ] [P2] Prepare deck for Paris AI Summit — due 2026-04-22 — source: cal/xyz789

## 🕐 Someday / Review
- [ ] [P3] Explore collab with Pr. Martin — source: thread/def456

## ✅ Completed Today
- [x] [P1] Ship v2.3 of Hermes Skills — completed 2026-04-18T14:30Z

Every task carries:

• Priority: P1 (today or the world ends), P2 (this week), P3 (nice-to-have)
• Due date when applicable — ISO 8601 only
• Source pointer — thread/<id>, cal/<id>, note/<id>, manual, dawn/<date>

🖐️ Interactive Operations

The owner talks to the ledger through five verbs:

add — capture a new task

> add: call Sarah about the book launch — P2 — due Friday

Agent parses, normalizes the due date, and inserts into the correct section.

done — close a task

> done: review Q2 partnership draft

Agent fuzzy-matches against current items, moves to ## ✅ Completed Today with a timestamp, and echoes what it closed so the owner can undo.

bump — change priority or date

> bump: Paris deck to P1
> bump: Sarah call to Monday

list — show the current state

• list today → only the 🔥 Today section
• list week → Today + This Week
• list all → full ledger

review — stand-up style summary

Three-line summary: open P1s, today's target, next blocker. Used by command-maestro for morning briefings.

🌙 Nightly Archive Pass (22:00)

Once a day, mission-ledger runs a janitorial pass:

1. Move ## ✅ Completed Today block to workspace/tasks/archive.md under a dated heading.
2. Promote overdue P2s → P1 and surface as an escalation only if the owner hasn't explicitly punted them today.
3. Flag any P1 that has been open more than 72 hours to command-maestro for EOD review.
4. Write HEARTBEAT_OK if nothing moved.

🧲 Magnetic Deduplication

When a new task is proposed (by the owner or by another skill), do not blindly append. Run:

1. Exact-string match against open tasks → reject, echo the existing item.
2. Semantic match (80%+ similarity on verb + object) → confirm with the caller once before adding.
3. Otherwise → insert.

This prevents the ledger from being polluted by mail-sentinel when the same email arrives twice, or by the owner capturing a task they already wrote down yesterday.

🤝 Contract with Other Skills

mission-ledger is the only skill that writes completions. Other skills propose; only the ledger disposes.

🧘 Resistance to Priority Inflation

If more than 7 items sit in 🔥 Today, the skill refuses the 8th. It asks the owner to first close, bump, or kill something. This is deliberate — a list of 15 P1s is a list of zero P1s.

⚠️ Hard Never-Dos

• Never silently delete a task — always archive.
• Never re-prioritize without a matching bump from the owner or a nightly escalation.
• Never leave the file in an invalid markdown state (always atomic write → rename).