vault-curate — what to write next, and what is rotting

vault-capture answers "record this." This skill answers the two questions capture can't: where is this vault thin, and what is decaying? Nothing else in the system owns them. Run it at a stopping point, when the user asks what to document next, or when a recall attempt came up empty on a topic that should have been written down.

Vault routing is the same as everywhere: vaultmem vaults for the registry, vaultmem which for the vault that routes here. Most commands below take -v <vault> to scope to one.

The gap surfaces — what should I write next?

• vaultmem dangling --by-target — every broken [[link]] in the vault, aggregated by missing target and ranked by inbound count. This is the most-wanted list: a target three notes point at is one the vault has already decided it needs. Write those first. Fixing a --by-target entry usually beats a new note from nowhere — it completes something already half-written.
• vaultmem frontier — ranks notes by frontier score (outbound minus inbound links, decayed by time since updated:). High scorers point outward at things nothing points back to — the edge of what's written down. -n caps the list. Use it when --by-target is clean but the vault still feels thin: frontier finds the directions the vault is reaching toward, not just the named holes.

Read a candidate before writing against it — vaultmem cat <note> --section '## <Heading>' — so a "gap" that is actually covered elsewhere doesn't become a duplicate. Then hand the actual writing to vault-capture (it owns placement, the Agent-Index update, and the resolve/dangling verification).

A DANGLING target found during traversal is a capture gap. When vault-recall's graph walk dead-ends on one, don't invent the missing note's content — record the target and bring it here; --by-target will show whether anything else wants it too.

The health surfaces — is the vault rotting?

• vaultmem doctor — hygiene over the Agent Index plus schema lints on Sessions/Projects. Exit 0 clean, 2 on findings. It reports:
  • BROKEN — an Agent-Index row whose [[wikilink]] resolves to no note or to a 0-byte stub. Usually a renamed/moved note, or the fabricated-note failure mode (a capture that was reported but never written).
  • STALE — a row still reading live (verdict/shipped/active/…) for a note whose status: says it was retracted (reverted, superseded, deprecated, done, archived, cancelled). The note moved on; the index still advertises the old answer.
  • Schema lints on Sessions/Projects — NOALIAS (a session missing aliases: [<thread>], which makes every [[<thread>]] back-link to it dangle), GLYPH-DESYNC (an H1/filename status glyph disagreeing with status:), GLYPHED-FOLDER (a Sessions/<thread>/ folder carrying a glyph — it desyncs the picker and groom, since sessions are keyed by folder basename == thread:), NO-UPDATED, MISSING-FM, EMPTY-BOOKMARK (an active session with nothing under ## Bookmark), and INDEX-DRIFT (a Project's ## Sessions row whose status token disagrees with the linked session's own status:).
  • Task lints on Tasks/ — TASK-STATUS (a status outside backlog|next|active|done; a typo silently drops the task out of vaultmem next), TASK-BLOCKED-DANGLING (a blocked_by: naming a task that does not exist, so the task hides behind a dependency nothing can ever satisfy), and TASK-NO-SESSION (an active task with no session: backlink — a promotion that left no trail to the session now owning it).
• vaultmem verify <file> — the same dangling check plus the doctor schema lints, scoped to one file. The fast way to check a single Session or Project note you (or a subagent) just wrote, without a vault-wide scan.
• vaultmem doctor --deep — adds a vault-wide reachability scan: ORPHAN (zero inbound [[wikilinks]] from anywhere else in the vault) and UNINDEXED (absent from both the Agent Index and every MOC). Home.md, MOCs/, Templates/, Sessions/, Projects/, and anything under _archive/ are excluded as candidates — they are hubs, lifecycle-tier notes, retired notes, or templates, not orphans by any useful definition. It is slower, so run it deliberately (a periodic audit), not every session.

Triage order. BROKEN before STALE before ORPHAN/UNINDEXED: a broken row is a link that actively lies, a stale row is an answer that has gone wrong, and an orphan is merely hard to find. Fix a BROKEN row by restoring the target's real basename (vaultmem resolve "<name>" to confirm) or by writing the note that was never written. Fix STALE by rewriting the row summary to match the note's current status. Fix ORPHAN/UNINDEXED by linking the note from the MOC or section it belongs to and adding its Agent-Index row.

doctor never rewrites anything — it is read-only by design, including INDEX-DRIFT on a Project file. Every fix is a deliberate edit you make.

The lifecycle surface — vaultmem groom

groom is the mechanical half of curation: it retires finished work so the live surfaces stay small.

• It moves every done session into Sessions/_archive/<thread>/ and flips its parent Project's ## Sessions row to archived. Safe to run anytime — done was already distilled at park time.
• It archives every done Project into Projects/_archive/ — unless a session outside _archive/ still points at it, in which case it prints a warning naming the blocking session(s) instead of moving it. Clear those first (archive or reassign the session) and re-run.
• It lists cold-parked sessions (parked and untouched past cold_days) and stale-active sessions (active but untouched past stale_active_days) for triage. It never auto-retires them.
• It archives every done task into Tasks/_archive/ (a done task has no dependents to strand, so nothing blocks the move) and lists stale backlog — backlog/next tasks untouched past VAULTMEM_TASK_STALE_DAYS (default 14). Blocked tasks are exempt: they are waiting on purpose, not rotting. Stale backlog matters more than it looks — an unstarted task is the one note type nothing else forces you to revisit, and a backlog nobody trusts makes vaultmem next useless. Promote, re-scope, or delete.

Archived is a location, not a status: archived notes drop out of every listing surface (picker, projects, project) but wikilinks keep resolving by basename/alias, so [[<thread>]] still works after the move.

Driving the triage itself — resume vs retire, the done-vs-parked decision, and Project retirement preconditions — belongs to the session skill (§ Lifecycle & grooming). Run groom here; take the decisions there.

A curation pass

When the user asks for a cleanup, an audit, or "what should I write next", run this in order and report findings rather than silently fixing everything:

1. vaultmem doctor — hygiene first. Fix BROKEN, then STALE.
2. vaultmem dangling --by-target — the most-wanted list. Propose the top 1–3 as notes to write.
3. vaultmem frontier -n 10 — the thin edge, when the named holes are clean.
4. vaultmem groom — archive what's finished; surface cold-parked and stale-active sessions for triage.
5. Periodically (not every session): vaultmem doctor --deep for ORPHAN / UNINDEXED notes that have fallen out of the graph.

Orient with vaultmem index (section shape) and vaultmem mocs (domain hubs) before deciding where a proposed note would live — a gap that has no obvious home may really be a missing MOC.

Handing off

• Actually writing a proposed note (placement, index row, verification) → vault-capture.
• Reading candidates before judging a gap → vault-recall.
• Deciding resume-vs-retire on a cold-parked or stale-active session, or retiring a Project → session.