WikiMem Observer — The Wiki That Improves Itself

What this skill does

The Observer is WikiMem's self-improvement loop (Automation 3 — the moat). It reads the whole vault, scores each page, finds the pages worth touching (weakest + newest + most-referenced), surfaces orphans, contradictions, and knowledge gaps, and — when allowed — auto-improves a budget-capped set of pages and writes exactly ONE git commit so the user can accept or reject the run via time-lapse restore. Budget-capped by design (default $2.00; a typical run is ~11 LLM calls ≈ $0.005–$0.01 on a tight cap).

Scoring dimensions: recency/freshness, citation quality, wikilink density, category coverage, TLDR/summary quality.

Trigger — invoke this skill when

• "Improve / clean up / tidy / polish my wiki" · "make my notes better"
• "What's weak / stale / orphaned in my vault?" · "score my wiki" · "find gaps"
• "Find contradictions" · "which pages need work?"
• "Set up the nightly self-improvement" / "run the Observer"

Do not invoke to add new content (that is wikimem-ingest-pipeline) or to answer a question from saved knowledge.

Steps

1. Resolve the vault:

   VAULT=$(find . -name "AGENTS.md" -maxdepth 3 | head -1 | xargs dirname 2>/dev/null || echo ".")

2. Always observe before improving (read-only, $0): get the report first so the user sees the diagnosis before any spend or change.

   wikimem observe --vault "$VAULT" --max-pages 100        # scores + orphans + gaps, no writes
   wikimem observe --vault "$VAULT" --json                  # same, machine-readable

3. Present the diagnosis — avg score, weak pages (< 60%), orphans, knowledge gaps, top recurring issues. THEN ask before spending: "Auto-improve the N weakest pages? (uses LLM, budget-capped)".
4. Improve, budget-first, on approval. Two equivalent entry points:

   # Observer with auto-improve, hard budget + page caps (preferred — explicit caps)
   wikimem observe --vault "$VAULT" --improve --max-improvements 5 --budget 0.50
   
   # Council-style improve against a quality threshold
   wikimem improve --vault "$VAULT" --threshold 80          # dry preview first:
   wikimem improve --vault "$VAULT" --threshold 80 --dry-run

   Each improve run writes one commit — keep it that way so it stays reviewable.
5. Show the delta and offer to accept/reject:

   wikimem status --vault "$VAULT"     # new avg score, orphans resolved
   wikimem history --vault "$VAULT"    # the Observer's commit; revert if unwanted

Scheduling the nightly loop

# 3am daily — observe + improve up to 5 pages under a tight budget
0 3 * * * cd /path/to/wiki && wikimem observe --improve --max-improvements 5 --budget 0.50

Use --budget and --max-improvements on the cron path; an uncapped nightly run can spend.

Expected output

Observer Report — 2026-06-06
Pages reviewed: 47/47   Avg score: 6.2/10
Weak (<60%): 8    Orphans: 3    Gaps: 5    Contradictions: 1
Top issues: missing TLDR (12), no tags (8), low wikilink density (6)

[after --improve] Improved 3 pages, $0.41 spent (cap $0.50), 1 commit written.
Accept this run, or `wikimem history` → revert?

Always report: avg score (before→after), what was changed, dollars spent vs cap, and that one commit was written (so it's reversible).

Anti-patterns

• Auto-improving without showing the read-only observe diagnosis first.
• Running the nightly cron without --budget / --max-improvements caps.
• Writing more than one commit per run (breaks clean accept/reject).
• Treating Observer output as final truth — it is a reviewable suggestion, revertible via wikimem history.

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