file-back

file-back — file the good answer back ("don't let this evaporate")

A second brain that only ever captures raw input slowly rots: the hard-won synthesis of a good exchange evaporates when the session ends. This skill is the "answers filed back" half of the Karpathy LLM-Wiki compile discipline (see ADR 0033): when a conversation produced something worth keeping, offer to distil it into a durable, well-linked note — so next time the brain knows it.

Principle

One promise: turn a substantive answer into a durable, conformant note — proposed first, written only on yes.

• The judgment is yours (and the user's): is this worth keeping? what type of note? where does it belong?
• The write is deterministic (ADR 0009): the note's path, its frontmatter (type/created/ updated/tags) and its woven [[links]] are built by a tested helper, conformant by construction — so a filed-back note never shows up later in a /lint report.
• The write is confirmed, never silent (the brain's write posture): propose, let the user say yes.

When to use it

After an exchange that produced durable value: a synthesised answer, a decision reached, a profile of a person that emerged, the notes of a meeting. Offer it; do not nag on every trivial turn. Good signals: the user says "keep this" / "garde ça", or you can feel the answer took real work and would be costly to reconstruct.

Procedure

1. Decide the shape (judgment)

Pick, from the vault taxonomy (see the constitution, §"Note format"):

• type → one of topic, decision, person, meeting (the four durable, non-raw zones).
  • topic → a cross-cutting concept (topics/<slug>.md).
  • decision → a dated decision record (decisions/<date>-<slug>.md).
  • person → a person page (people/<firstname-lastname>.md).
  • meeting → dated meeting notes (meetings/<date>-<slug>.md).
• title → a clear, human title (the builder slugifies it: kebab-case, no accents).
• tags → at least one (required for conformance).
• body → the distilled synthesis, in the user's language. Be concise and self-contained.
• links → the existing notes this connects to, as [[people/jane-doe]], [[topics/rag]] paths. Prefer targets that already exist (run /lint if unsure) so you don't create dangling links.
• distinguish (person only) → what tells this person apart from everyone the vault already knows by that first name: their role, their organisation, and the other cards by name. It becomes the card's homonymy block, under the title. Give it whenever the first name is not obviously unique — a card that does not say which Romain moves the ambiguity into the vault instead of resolving it, and the next resolution inherits it. See the identity discipline in sync-sources.
• sources (required on every note, the builder refuses without it) → what this note was built from, as [{"tier":…,"ref":…}], one entry per source actually read:
  • verbatim → the raw thing itself: a transcript's own turns, the message as sent, the document.
  • conversation → this exchange, when the note distils what was worked out here and nothing external.
  • human-summary → someone's recap of something they attended or read.
  • ai-summary → a note-taker's synthesis (Gemini, Noota, Fathom, tl;dv, Otter, Fireflies, Read.ai…). The ref names the document, the section and the date, so the reading can be gone back to. A search-result snippet is not a source and is refused as such: open the document and declare the tier you actually read. When a document holds both a summary and the verbatim — a Meet export is exactly that, the AI notes first, the transcription below — the verbatim is the source; read it, and declare the summary too only if you leaned on it. The weakest declared tier is stamped as source_tier: in the frontmatter, so "which notes here rest on an AI synthesis?" stays a query rather than a re-read.
• confidence (person — required, the builder refuses without it) → what this card's identity actually rests on: {"level":"observed|probable|unverified","basis":"…"}. Same scale as the claim discipline, deliberately: observed = you read the full name at a source you can cite, probable = you resolved it from context, unverified = you could not confirm it. The basis says on what (the source, its date, the card it matched). It becomes the card's confidence block and a frontmatter field. Required rather than offered because a conformant card born of a guess is indistinguishable from one born of a signed source, and the vault reads both as truth forever.