thebrain-organize

Tidying up a brain

A brain accumulates disorder quietly: duplicates born of different phrasings, orphan thoughts, stubs with no notes, two branches about the same thing under different names.

The governing rule: propose, do not act silently. The structure is authored, and what looks like a duplicate may be a deliberate distinction.

What to look for

Duplicates

Search for one concept through several phrasings and see whether different thoughts about the same thing come back:

brain_search { query: "<concept>", variants: ["synonym", "translation", "acronym"], limit: 20 }

A duplicate candidate is a pair of semantically close thoughts with different identifiers and overlapping notes. Before proposing a merge, read both in full: the difference may be substantive.

Orphans

Thoughts with no links get lost: traversal cannot reach them, only search can.

brain_recent_changes { limit: 200, identifiers: true }

identifiers: true adds a Thoughts section under the table: every thought the rows name that is still there, once, as name — identifier. Without since the rows cover the last seven days; give an earlier since to look further back. Take the identifiers from that section and check each thought's neighbourhood:

brain_get_thought { thoughtId: "<identifier from the Thoughts section>" }

Empty in every link section means an orphan. Propose where to attach it, based on a search for something similar.

A thought the rows show as name (deleted) is gone, and is not in the section: there is nothing to attach.

That holds for an ordinary thought only. A type or a tag is vocabulary, not a thought that lost its place: nothing is meant to sit above it, and one that nothing uses yet shows a heading and no sections at all, which is exactly what an orphan looks like. Tell them apart by the mark that only a type or a tag carries, [type] or [tag]: after the name in the rows of brain_recent_changes, after the identifier in its Thoughts section and in brain_get_thought. Leave a marked thought out of the hunt, and never propose a parent for it. One that is in use lists its thoughts under Thoughts of this type or Thoughts with this tag; one that is not is unused vocabulary, worth at most a line of its own in the report.