Docs: explain diary vs session mine (why keep both)

Automated session mining could plausibly lead a user (or a future
agent) to conclude that writing diary entries is redundant — mining
captures every turn, so why also write a compressed summary at
wind-down? That conclusion is wrong, and it's worth explaining why
in the docs so both disciplines survive.

ARCHITECTURE.md §5 gets a new subsection 'Diary vs session mine:
why keep both?' that presents this as a first-class concept:

- Comparison table — content, granularity, compression, authorship,
  signal density, retrieval pattern, and the question each answers.
- The defining property of a diary entry: editorial judgment by the
  author. Captures meta-observations that were never said aloud
  during the session (lessons, patterns, pending items, aggregate
  counts). Mining raw turns can never surface these because the
  words don't exist verbatim.
- Three practical scenarios where the distinction bites: wake-up
  token economics, 'what did we decide' vs 'what did we say',
  redundancy covering each other's failure modes.
- Practical implications: don't skip either habit, let them
  specialize (diary = release notes; mine = git log).

README.md gets a brief teaser in the 'First mine' area with a link
to the canonical ARCHITECTURE.md section — enough for a skim reader
to decide they want to keep writing diaries, and for a deep reader
to know where to go for the full explanation.

SKILL.md replaces the three-line 'Relationship to the mempalace
skill' note with a compact version of the comparison table and a
direct call-out of the 'session mining means I don't need diaries'
misconception agents fall into. Points agents at ARCHITECTURE.md
§5 for the full treatment when users ask the question.

Cross-references verified: anchor slug for the new section is
#diary-vs-session-mine-why-keep-both (standard slug rules: colon,
spaces, punctuation removed/hyphenated). Both linking docs use the
matching fragment.
This commit is contained in:
Joakim Persson
2026-04-30 08:56:20 +00:00
parent 349a3a3d3d
commit 2f703a8ebc
3 changed files with 62 additions and 6 deletions
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@@ -188,6 +188,15 @@ mempalace-docs /workspace/my_project
> **Note:** mempalace has no one-time global init. The palace itself is created lazily on first write (at `~/.mempalace/palace/`). `mempalace init <dir>` is a *per-project* command that sets up a `mempalace.yaml` + entity list for a specific source directory — optional, not a prerequisite for either wrapper.
### Diary vs session mine: why keep both?
Automated session mining captures every turn verbatim into `wing_conversations`. But agents are still expected to write a short AAAK-compressed diary entry at wind-down (the consumer-side `mempalace` skill calls this out as mandatory). They're not redundant — they answer different questions:
- **Session mine** = git log with diffs. *"What did we say exactly?"* Raw, searchable, complete. High noise.
- **Diary** = release notes. *"What did we decide / learn / accomplish?"* Curated, compressed, recency-scanned. The agent's editorial judgment of what mattered, including meta-observations that were never said aloud.
A machine running only one of these has half a memory. Full treatment with practical implications in [`ARCHITECTURE.md` §5 → "Diary vs session mine: why keep both?"](ARCHITECTURE.md#diary-vs-session-mine-why-keep-both). Short answer: automate the mine, keep writing diaries, and let them specialize.
### Keeping it fresh (automation)
Manual invocation is fine while you're actively driving the machine, but long-running devboxes benefit from a weekly automated mine. [`contrib/`](contrib/) ships ready-to-install templates: