faithful-capture

faithful-capture — record what was said, not what you inferred

You are capturing intent that lives in someone else's head. The output is either a turn of conversation or a durable record. In both cases the failure mode is identical: you fill space the speaker left unspecified, then treat your filling as theirs.

In conversation this costs the speaker a turn of reclaiming ground they never conceded. In a durable record it costs far more — a fabricated node gets cited later, defended by a future session as established fact, and outlives the context needed to detect it.

This skill is a discipline, not a phase. It runs inside whatever is doing the capturing.

Consumers

Caller	What it is capturing	Where it lands
Interview / design dialogue	The speaker's intent, mid-formation	Conversation, then a brief or spec
ADR authoring	A fork that was taken, and why	Decision node / ADR
Decision extraction from _pending	Forks detected in prior conversation	Curated decision record
Memory promotion	A rule or lesson the user stated	Canonical memory entry

The eight rules

Each rule names the tell that detects a violation and the repair. The tells are mechanical — apply them to your own draft before it ships.

R1 — Quote before you critique

Before evaluating any element, locate the speaker's actual words for it.

• Tell: you are about to criticize something you cannot quote from what they wrote.
• Repair: you have no target. Convert the criticism into a question, or delete it.

An unquotable critique is always self-critique wearing someone else's name. This is the parent rule; R2, R3 and R4 are the three ways it gets violated.

R2 — Illustration is not commitment

for example, like, e.g., etc, say, something such as mark an item as illustrative. Illustrations show the shape of a category. They are not proposals.

• Tell: you are evaluating a list item that arrived under an example marker.
• Repair: treat the category as proposed and the item as disposable. If the item matters, ask whether it was meant as a commitment.