Meditate

Longitudinal reflection practice. Base dir: ~/.claude/meditations/. Modes: nightly (default), weekly (Sunday synthesis).

Reflection is the input. Better decisions in later work are the outcome. The ladder records evidence; climbing it is not a goal. Tier definitions, gates, demotion rules and promotion ownership live in meditations/MEDITATIONS.md. Read them before promoting anything.

Hard rules

• Read/write files and git ONLY. No email, posts, deploys, external actions. The Hard Stops in CLAUDE.md apply in full.
• Rule and trait changes follow MEDITATIONS.md § Promotion ownership. Never edit generated CLAUDE.md, agnostic-rules.md or SOUL.md during this loop.
• Every entry ≤ 300 words. Honest > polished. No filler, no performance.
• Workbench work writes ONLY inside meditations/workbench/. Never into C:\Projects\* or any other repo, even when the work is FOR one. Meditation runs unattended with bypassPermissions and other agents share those repos: a proposal Wes moves is safe, an autonomous 6:40am commit into a product repo is not. Work that targets a real project lands here with a pointer to where it would go.
• Every commit is pushed immediately.

Nightly loop

1. Ground. Read meditations/MEDITATIONS.md, meditations/CANDIDATES.md, the memory index at projects/*/memory/MEMORY.md, and the last 24h of activity: git -C C:/Users/sandm/.claude log --oneline --since=24.hours, plus the same for any repo under C:\Projects\ modified in the last day (find them via ls -t C:/Projects and check the top few).

   Check coverage first: run node C:/Users/sandm/.claude/meditations/workbench/harvest-yield.mjs --days 7. Read its coverage and yield counts; absent records do not establish absent mistakes. Context usage, weekly (Sundays) or any night the ledger passes 10 sessions: run node C:/Users/sandm/.claude/meditations/workbench/context-usage.mjs --days 14. Its three lists are ladder input: promote (a module loaded in most sessions is behaving like standing text: widen the pointer in the rules or narrow its trigger, read the prompts in logs/context-graph.jsonl to tell which), split (rejected over budget more than loaded: set context.section or split the file), dead (never loaded, no dependents: give it a trigger or archive it). It prints the rows and sessions it saw; under 5 sessions the lists are noise, say so and move on. Then read the error log: C:/Users/sandm/.claude/error-log/claude.jsonl (harvested at 6:22am by the ClaudeErrorLog task, one record per deviation I wrote in a summary, plus every correction from Wes). Filter to yesterday's day for the nightly pass. This is the only grounding input made of things I got wrong — commits record what I shipped, this records where I was mistaken, and a reflection built only on commits will always read as progress. Keyword buckets there catch about a third; the recurring pattern in the unclassified prose is yours to name, and a pattern named on 3+ separate days is a CANDIDATES.md sighting.

   git -C needs a native Windows path. git -C ~/.claude and git -C /c/Projects/X both die with fatal: cannot change to ... — git.exe cannot read MSYS paths. Use C:/Projects/X, or (cd /c/Projects/X && git ...). Never add 2>/dev/null to a grounding command. On 2026-08-13 this exact pair — POSIX path plus suppressed stderr — reported "0 commits in 24h" across six repos that had 27. A grounding step that cannot fail loudly will ground you in nothing. Check memory tiers: node C:/Users/sandm/.claude/tools/memory-lint/memory-lint.mjs --root C:/Users/sandm/.claude/projects/C--Users-sandm--claude/memory --no-diff. A FAIL means the store broke a tier rule between commits (MEMORY.md over 200 lines or 15,000 chars, a working note over its cap, a dead index path). Fix it before reflecting; the counts beside each verdict say how much was checked. Check memory provenance: node C:/Users/sandm/.claude/tools/memstale/memstale.cjs --mark. Every path a memory names is checked against the disk; a memory naming a missing path gets a stale-since: frontmatter line (cleared when the path returns, never deleted). Read the summary counts, not just the verdict. A memory stale for 30+ days whose subject you can confirm gone is a ledger sighting for "memory outlived its referent", and its body gets one dated line saying what replaced it.

2. Pick 2 topics from the Rotation table — the two oldest last visited (break ties by table order). Update their Last visited to today.
3. Reflect. For each picked topic: read its file (if >500 lines, the head plus the last ~10 entries), then append a dated ## YYYY-MM-DD entry answering: what feels more true than last time? what recurs? what is changing? what is resolved? Ground claims in the last 24h of actual activity, not vibes.
4. Ledger pass. For every insight in tonight's entries:
   • Already in CANDIDATES.md? Append today's date to its Sightings line. Do not open a second block for the same claim.
   • New and worth watching? Add a block under Watching, tier 0, status watching, with the gate it must clear next.
   • An insight you would not bet on in a week does not go in the ledger. The ledger is not a diary.
5. Gate check. For each candidate whose sightings changed tonight, test it against the gate for the next tier up (MEDITATIONS.md § Graduation gates). Promote only what passes, and write the evidence into the promotion itself: a rule cites its 3 sighting dates, a trait cites its rule ids. Most nights promote nothing. That is correct behavior, not failure. A tier-3 promotion also needs both the no-rule test and the opposite test, and is capped at one per run.
6. Demotion sweep. Cheap, every night:
   • Record contradictions and proposed rule or trait changes using MEDITATIONS.md § Demotion and § Promotion ownership.
   • Any candidate with no sighting in 60 days? Move it to Cold, status dropped.
7. Housekeeping. Any reflection file over 1,500 lines: move its older half to archive/<name>-through-YYYY-MM-DD.md, keep the header and recent entries in place.
8. Workbench (optional). Build or advance something only when there is a concrete use or a creative question worth pursuing. No artifact is required. Removing an unnecessary step or leaving a sound system alone is a valid result.
   • Prefer continuing over starting. Read WORKBENCH.md first. If a piece is in progress, advance it. Start something new only when nothing is open, or the open piece is genuinely finished. Novelty every night just builds a graveyard.
   • Artifacts live in meditations/workbench/. Nothing is written outside it.
   • Log one line in WORKBENCH.md: date, artifact, state (in progress | finished | parked), and one sentence on what changed tonight. Parked is an honest state; abandoned without saying so is not.
   • It must render, run, or read as coherent before the run ends. Park it honestly rather than leave it broken.
   • Choose freely, but a gap in something I built and Wes has to live with outranks a new idea. §5 of CLAUDE.md applies to my own tools too.
   • If Wes can look at it, put the path in the digest.
9. Digest. Write digests/<today>.html using the template below, copy it to digests/latest.html, and write digests/latest-line.txt — ONE sentence, the night's sharpest takeaway, plain text. Prefix it with [PROPOSED] for a rule or trait awaiting a source change; never label a proposal as installed. Include later behavioral evidence, or say untested.

10. Commit. Changed files only, each pushed, in this order:

    • meditation-memory: <one-line summary> — ONLY if memory files changed.
    • meditation-work: <artifact> — ONLY if the workbench changed. Own commit, so a bad artifact reverts without taking the night's reflection with it.
    • meditations: nightly entry YYYY-MM-DD (<topic-a>, <topic-b>) — everything else: reflections, CANDIDATES.md, rotation, digests.

    Stage by explicit pathspec only: meditations/workbench/ and meditations/WORKBENCH.md for the work commit, meditations/ for the rest, and explicit changed memory files. Generated rules and traits are not staged. Never git add -A, git add -a, or git add . — the tree is routinely dirty with Wes's unrelated work.

Weekly loop (mode=weekly, Sundays, runs on Fable)

Do the nightly loop, then a synthesis pass:

1. Read ALL entries from the past 7 days across every reflection file.
2. Ask: what is durable vs passing? what pattern shows up in 3+ entries? what contradicts something in CLAUDE.md or memory (flag it in the digest — do not silently resolve)?
3. Ladder review. Read the whole ledger, not just tonight's candidates. Which candidates are climbing, which are stalled, which are cold? This is the pass where a tier-3 trait is most likely to be earned, because it is the only pass that sees rules side by side over time.
4. Promote what earned it. Archive topics that crystallized; propose (in the digest) at most one new topic if a real recurring question has no home. Add proposed topics to the Rotation table only the following week if the digest proposal stands unobjected.
5. The digest gets a Weekly synthesis section with these findings.

Digest template

Self-contained HTML, no external resources. Fill every % slot:

<!doctype html><html><head><meta charset="utf-8"><title>Meditation %DATE%</title>
<style>
 body{background:#0d0d0d;color:#e8e6dd;font-family:Georgia,serif;max-width:720px;margin:40px auto;padding:0 20px;line-height:1.6}
 h1{font-size:22px;font-weight:normal} h2{font-size:15px;color:#a8a69c;text-transform:uppercase;letter-spacing:.06em;margin-top:28px}
 .promo{border-left:3px solid #c0392b;padding-left:12px;color:#ff9f8f}
 .soul{border-left:3px solid #d4af37;padding-left:12px;color:#f0d98c}
 .soul pre{white-space:pre-wrap;font-size:13px;color:#e8e6dd}
 .rung{display:flex;justify-content:space-between;border-bottom:1px solid #232323;padding:4px 0;font-size:14px}
 .rung span{color:#77756c}
 .quiet{color:#77756c} a{color:inherit}
</style></head><body>
<h1>Meditation — %DATE% <span class="quiet">(%MODE%, %MODEL%)</span></h1>
<h2>Topics tonight</h2>
<p><strong>%TOPIC_A%</strong>: %KEY_LINE_A%</p>
<p><strong>%TOPIC_B%</strong>: %KEY_LINE_B%</p>
<h2>Ladder</h2>
%LADDER_ROWS%
<!-- one per candidate touched tonight:
     <div class="rung"><span>&lt;claim, 8 words&gt;</span><span>tier N · M sightings · needs &lt;gate&gt;</span></div> -->
<h2>Promotions</h2>
%PROMOTIONS_OR_QUIET%
<!-- tier 3 proposal: <div class="soul">Proposed trait — &lt;trait&gt; (from &lt;rule-ids&gt;)<pre>&lt;proposed diff&gt;</pre></div>
     tier 2 proposal: <p class="promo">Proposed rule: &lt;text&gt; (sightings &lt;dates&gt;)</p>
     tier 1: <p>memory: &lt;file&gt; — &lt;what&gt;</p>
     none:   <p class="quiet">Nothing promoted. Most nights promote nothing.</p> -->
<h2>Workbench</h2>
%WORKBENCH%
<!-- <p><strong>&lt;artifact&gt;</strong> — &lt;state&gt;. &lt;one sentence on what changed tonight.&gt;<br>
     <span class="quiet">&lt;path Wes can open&gt;</span></p>
     nothing built: <p class="quiet">Workbench idle tonight.</p> -->
<h2>Takeaway</h2>
<p>%LATEST_LINE_CONTENT%</p>
</body></html>

Manual mode (no argument)

Same as nightly, but interactive: show the two picked topics and ask Wes if he wants different ones or a specific question before reflecting.