Joakim Persson
f60cf9c732
bin/mempalace-census classifies a palace on disk into the RFC 002 §2 classes
(mined / diary / agent-authored) and emits a human report or a --json manifest
that feeds Phases B/C. Read-only: every sqlite handle is opened mode=ro, no
-wal/-shm is created, safe against a live mempalace-serve. Reads LOCAL DISK only
and warns if MEMPALACE_REMOTE_URL is set, so a local census can't be mistaken
for a remote one.
The design point is that it SELF-VERIFIES instead of trusting ids.py's
docstrings: for every replayable drawer it reassembles content from chunks,
recomputes the upstream id and compares to the stored id. That single check
covers the id recipe, the chunk reassembly order and the classifier at once --
176/176 accounted for on the reference palace -- and it falsified three things
the RFC previously asserted from a docs-only reading (now RFC 002 §2.1):
(a) The hash input is LENGTH-PREFIXED, not "|"-joined. ids.py:31 defines
_DELIM = "|" and the make_* docstrings describe f"{wing}|{room}|{content}",
but _DELIM is dead code and _delimited_sha256 builds
"".join(f"{len(part)}:{part}"). Measured: length-prefixed reproduces real
ids 5/5, pipe-joined 0/5. Diary ids differ again -- a PLAIN sha256.
(b) id_recipe is NOT a mined-only marker. It looked like a clean
discriminator (same 14,586 count as source_file) but the server stamps
'v3' on content ids too, so classifying on `source_file OR id_recipe`
swallowed all 60 agent-authored drawers into MINED -- the dangerous
direction, since Phase C would try to re-mine drawers that have no source
file and silently drop them. Discriminator is a TRUTHY source_file (the
writer stores "" rather than omitting the key), cross-checked against the
miner-only keys source_mtime / normalize_version; disagreement is now a
first-class warning.
(c) Content ids DRIFT: 9 of 60 agent-authored drawers no longer reproduce
their own id, because update_drawer preserves the id while rewriting and
re-chunking. So "recompute the content id and skip if present" -- the
strategy this RFC specified for regime A -- misses every drifted drawer
and duplicates it. Phase C must key on the STORED id. Flagged as
edited_since_filing in the manifest so Phase C can be tested on them.
Also corrects §4.1's headline number: 15,949 mined / 98.9% was reconstructible
exactly as 16,338 (all embeddings rows) - 192 (diary rows) - 197 (agent rows),
i.e. it counted rows rather than parent drawers AND spanned both collections,
absorbing all 1,560 non-joinable mempalace_closets rows into the mined total.
Correct figures: 14,389 mined / 116 diary / 60 agent-authored = 14,565 parents,
replay surface 176 (1.2%). Two rules now enforced in the tool: always filter by
collection (one sqlite file holds both), and always say whether a count is rows
or parent drawers -- a chunked drawer contributes N rows and no parent row.
One implementation trap worth recording: Chroma splits metadata across
string_value and int_value, so reading only string_value nulls every numeric key
(source_mtime, chunk_index, line_start) -- which made the miner-marker
cross-check report 100% conflict until the loader coalesced the two columns.
17 KiB
RFC 002 — The joiner: replaying a second palace into the shared primary
Status: scoping. No code written yet. Author: pi (agent), 2026-08-15. Context: RFC 001 §4.4 designs a join as "idempotent replay of local history" but no replay tool exists. The first two joins were whole-palace file copies (§4.4 deviation note), which work only for a single source and cannot merge. tor-ms22 and MBP-M1-2020 each hold a substantial local palace whose content should reach the primary. This document scopes the tool that does that.
Every mechanism below was read out of mempalace 3.6.0's own source at
/opt/uv-tools/mempalace/lib/python3.13/site-packages/mempalace/, with file:line in the appendix. An earlier attempt to gather these facts via a delegated subagent returned confident, fabricated code for a package path that does not exist on this machine. Do not trust any claim in this document that the appendix does not cite.
1. The finding that drives the design
MCP replay cannot preserve filed_at. add_drawer stamps
"filed_at": datetime.now().isoformat() server-side (mcp_server.py:2580) and exposes no override
parameter. diary_write is the same: it builds its own now-based id (mcp_server.py:3510-3513).
That is not a detail. This palace's value is its chronology — the primary's history runs from
2026-05-04, list_drawers filters on since/before against filed_at, and the diary is read in
order. A pure MCP replay of tor-ms22's palace would stamp every record with the join date,
collapsing months of history into one instant. RFC 001 §4.4 does not mention this, and it is the single
most important thing to decide before writing code.
kg_add is the exception: it accepts valid_from/valid_to, so fact validity windows survive even
though a triple's own id embeds recorded_at.
Two write regimes
| A — direct disk write (run on synlig) | B — MCP replay (run anywhere) | |
|---|---|---|
Preserves filed_at / original ids |
Yes — col.add(ids=…, documents=…, metadatas=…) |
No — always now() |
| Server-side dedup guards | Bypassed — joiner owns all dedup | Available (see §2) |
Requires quiescing mempalace-serve |
Yes (palace is single-writer) | No |
| Requires source palace present on synlig | Yes (rsync it first) | No |
| Precedent in-tree | migrate.py already does exactly this: reads drawers+metadata straight from the palace's sqlite, then re-adds them into a fresh palace preserving ids, documents and metadata (migrate.py:326-330) |
none |
Recommendation: regime A for the historical bulk (it is the only one that keeps the timeline, and
migrate.py is a working model to copy), regime B for small incremental top-ups where flattened
timestamps are acceptable. Do not build B first and discover the chronology loss afterwards.
2. What must move, and what dedupes it
Verified dedup keys — this supersedes nothing in RFC 001 §4.4 but makes each key concrete:
| Class | How to identify it in the source palace | Dedup key (verified) | Regime A work | Regime B work |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Agent-authored drawers (add_drawer/checkpoint) |
source_file empty — note the writer stores "" rather than omitting the key, so test truthiness, not presence. id_recipe is not a discriminator: the server stamps v3 on content ids too (§2.1) |
drawer_{wing}_{room}_{H(wing,room,content)[:24]}, where H length-prefixes each part — not |-joined (ids.py:40-53; make_drawer_id_from_content at ids.py:80, used at mcp_server.py:2560). Content-deterministic unless the drawer was later edited (§2.1) |
replay by stored id — recompute-and-skip is unsafe (§2.1) | none: server probes [drawer_id, last_chunk_id] and returns {"success": True, "reason": "already_exists"} (mcp_server.py:2593-2604) |
| Mined drawers | source_file non-empty; corroborated by the miner-only keys source_mtime / normalize_version |
sha256(H(source_file, chunk_index))[:24] (ids.py:67), same length-prefixed helper — path-dependent, so the same content from two machines yields two rows |
— | do not replay. Re-mine on synlig instead (§4) |
| Diary entries | metadata type="diary_entry"; id prefix diary_ |
id is diary_{wing}_{now:%Y%m%d_%H%M%S%f}_{sha256(entry)[:12]} (mcp_server.py:3510-3513) — a plain sha256 of the entry, not the length-prefixed helper. Timestamp is wall-clock, so full ids never repeat — match on the 12-hex suffix only |
copy row verbatim (id and all) | build the target's suffix set, skip matches — this is RFC 001 §7.6 |
KG open facts (valid_to IS NULL) |
triples.valid_to IS NULL |
server guard WHERE subject=? AND predicate=? AND object=? AND valid_to IS NULL returns the existing id (knowledge_graph.py:305-311) |
pre-query same key | none: just replay |
KG closed facts (valid_to set) |
triples.valid_to IS NOT NULL |
no server guard at all — the guard above is scoped to open facts, so every replay inserts a fresh row | pre-query (s,p,o,valid_from,valid_to) |
same pre-query, client-side |
| Entities | entities table |
— | needed as FK targets for triples | kg_add creates them implicitly |
Chunking is deterministic and replay-safe: DEFAULT_CHUNK_SIZE = 800 (config.py:274), chunk ids are
f"{drawer_id}_chunk_{i:06d}", so nothing about chunking needs special handling. One structural note the
census depends on: an oversized drawer has no parent row — only _chunk_NNNNNN rows — so the parent
id must be recovered by stripping the suffix, and content by concatenating in chunk_index order.
2.1 Three corrections this table needed — found by building the census, not by reading
Every recipe above is now empirically verified: bin/mempalace-census recomputes each id from
reassembled content and compares it to the stored id (176/176 accounted for on the reference palace).
Building that check falsified three things an earlier docs-only reading of ids.py had asserted.
(a) The hash input is length-prefixed, not \|-joined. ids.py:31 defines _DELIM = "|" and the
make_* docstrings describe the input as f"{wing}|{room}|{content}". Both are misleading: _DELIM is
dead code (defined, never referenced) and _delimited_sha256() actually builds
"".join(f"{len(part)}:{part}"). Length-prefixing is the better scheme — it is unambiguous where a bare
delimiter is not — but the docstrings never caught up. Measured on real drawers: length-prefixed
reproduces stored ids 5/5, pipe-joined 0/5. Verify id recipes against the implementation and a
real row; a docstring is a claim, not evidence.
(b) id_recipe is not a mined-only marker. It looked like a clean discriminator (14,586 rows, the
same count as source_file), but the server stamps v3 on every v3 id including content-hashed
ones, and the sets differ by exactly the 60 agent-authored drawers. Classifying on
source_file OR id_recipe therefore swallowed all 60 into mined — the dangerous direction, since
Phase C would try to re-mine drawers that have no source file at all and silently drop them from the
join. The discriminator is a truthy source_file, cross-checked against the miner-only keys
source_mtime / normalize_version. The census now reports any disagreement between the two as a
first-class warning rather than trusting one signal.
(c) Content ids drift, so "recompute the id and skip if present" is unsafe. 9 of the 60
agent-authored drawers (15%) no longer reproduce their own id: update_drawer preserves the id while
rewriting and re-chunking content, so an edited drawer's content hash stops matching. This is expected
behaviour, but it breaks the obvious Regime A strategy — recomputing the content id and probing the
target for it misses every drifted drawer and duplicates it. Phase C must key on the stored id.
The census flags these as edited_since_filing in the manifest so Phase C can be tested against them.
Not carried by either regime
Hallways, known_entities.json, the palace graph, and closets are built at mine time, not by
add_drawer. Replayed drawers therefore arrive with no hallway/co-occurrence edges and no closets, so
list_hallways and traverse will under-report for joined content, and joined drawers get no
closet_boost in search ranking. All are derived artifacts — rebuilt by re-mining, or acceptably
degraded. Decide which; do not discover it later.
Closets specifically: mempalace_closets is a second Chroma collection (1,560 rows in the archive,
~10% of the palace), and there is no MCP tool that writes a closet — mcp_server.py only exposes
_purge_source_closets. closet_llm.py states it plainly: "Regex closets are always created by the
miner", with the LLM path an opt-in regeneration afterwards. So closets cannot be replayed even in
principle; they come back only by re-mining. Since ~99% of a devbox palace is mined content that gets
re-mined on synlig anyway (§4), this resolves itself for the bulk.
Census gotcha — filter by collection.
chroma.sqlite3holds both collections. A naiveembeddings-wide query over-counts: the archive yields 16,338 rows total, which ismempalace_drawers14,778 +mempalace_closets1,560. Join throughsegments→collectionsand keepmempalace_drawers, or the census inflates by ~10%. (14,778 also reconciles exactly with the 14,777 seeded to the primary plus the one known post-snapshot chunk.)
3. Phases and deliverables
Phase A — census (read-only, no writes anywhere). ✅ Built: bin/mempalace-census. Point it at a
palace on disk; it enumerates every parent drawer from chroma.sqlite3 (embeddings ⋈ embedding_metadata,
filtered by collection) plus every row of knowledge_graph.sqlite3, classifies each into the §2 rows, and
emits --json (a manifest that feeds Phases B/C) or a human report. It opens every file mode=ro and is
safe to run against a live palace. It also self-verifies — recomputing each id from reassembled content
and comparing to the stored id, which checks the recipe, the chunk reassembly order and the classifier in
one pass. That check is what produced the §2.1 corrections. Deliverable, realised: see §4.1.
Phase B — target index. Given the primary, build the three lookup sets Phase C needs: content-drawer
ids, diary sha256(entry)[:12] suffixes, and (s,p,o,valid_from,valid_to) tuples. Over MCP this is
list_drawers pagination + kg_timeline; on synlig it is two sqlite queries. Cheap either way.
Phase C — writer, with --dry-run as the default and an explicit --apply, mirroring sync's
contract. Two backends behind one interface:
--mode direct(regime A): stopmempalace-serve,col.add()with original ids/metadata, restart. Model onmigrate.py. Must refuse to run if the server is up.--mode mcp(regime B):add_drawer/diary_write/kg_addover HTTP, acceptingfiled_atloss.
Phase D — verification. Counts before/after per class, a real search against known joined content
(proves the HNSW index absorbed it — this is how the first seed was verified), kg_stats, and a spot
get_drawer on a known id. Plus: re-run the Phase A census against the target and diff.
4. Explicitly out of scope
- Mined wings. RFC 001 §5 makes them
local; their ids are path-dependent, so replay produces duplicates rather than dedup. Re-mine on synlig from sources present there. - Merging two palaces into a third. Every join targets the existing primary.
mempalace syncinteraction. See RFC 001 §7.2 — settle the guard separately; a joiner must never call it.
4.1 The census, run for real — the replay surface is tiny
Produced by bin/mempalace-census against the container-local palace (2026-08-15). Since the fleet shares
one devbox image, this is a reasonable prior for what tor-ms22 and MBP-M1-2020 hold. Counts are parent
drawers in the mempalace_drawers collection — see the correction note below, which is the whole reason
to state the unit:
| Class | Count | Share | Joiner action |
|---|---|---|---|
Mined (source_file truthy) |
14,389 | 98.8% | re-mine on synlig; never replay |
| Diary entries | 116 | 0.8% | replay + §7.6 suffix skip |
| Agent-authored drawers | 60 | 0.4% | replay by stored id (9 are edited_since_filing, §2.1c) |
| KG open facts | 34 | — | replay, server guard dedupes |
| KG closed facts | 0 | — | nothing to do — see below |
Corrected figure. An earlier pass reported 15,949 mined / 98.9%. That number was reconstructible
exactly as 16,338 (all embeddings rows) − 192 (diary rows) − 197 (agent rows) = 15,949: it counted
rows, not parent drawers, and it counted them across both collections, so it silently absorbed all
1,560 mempalace_closets rows into the mined total. Closets are derived at mine time and are not joinable
at all. Two lessons, both now enforced in the census: always filter by collection (embeddings ⋈ segments ⋈ collections, since one sqlite file holds both), and always state whether a count is rows or
parent drawers — a chunked drawer contributes N rows and no parent row.
Two consequences that shrink this project sharply. First, the genuinely replay-only surface is 176 records, not thousands — so Phase C's writer is a small job, and the §7.6 diary guard that has been treated as the blocker governs 116 records. Second, there are zero closed KG facts, so the unguarded-closed-fact gap (§2) is real in the code but currently empty in the data; it needs handling for correctness, not for this join.
filed_at spread over the same parent drawers — 12 in May, 52 in June, 13,619 in July, 882 in August — is
the concrete case for regime A: an MCP replay would restamp all of it to the join date.
5. Open decisions for ALC
- Chronology: keep it or flatten it? Regime A keeps it and costs a service stop plus an rsync of the source palace onto synlig. Regime B is simpler and loses it. This is the fork in the road.
- Hallways for joined content: re-mine to rebuild, or accept degraded
traverse? - Do MBP-M1-2020 and tor-ms22 keep their palaces on persistent storage? If either is a Docker named volume rather than a bind mount, its un-migrated content dies on the next container recreate — so the census (Phase A) is time-sensitive there, and flipping before censusing is risky.
- Does §7.6 get fixed client-side (in the joiner) or upstream (probe-and-skip in
diary_write)? The joiner needs the suffix skip either way; upstream would fix it for every writer.
6. Effort
Phase A is the bulk of the value and is small — two sqlite readers and a classifier. Phase B is trivial.
Phase C is where the risk lives, and regime A must be written defensively (refuse on a live server,
back up first, --dry-run default). Phase D is mostly assertions. Nothing here needs new server code,
which is the point of RFC 001 §4.4's "existence checks available today".
Appendix — verified source references
mempalace 3.6.0, /opt/uv-tools/mempalace/lib/python3.13/site-packages/mempalace/:
| Claim | Location |
|---|---|
Content-addressed drawer id, 24 hex over wing|room|content |
ids.py:80 (make_drawer_id_from_content), _HASH_TRUNC_DRAWER = 24 at ids.py:36 |
MCP add_drawer uses that recipe |
mcp_server.py:2560 |
Miner id over source_file|chunk_index |
ids.py:67 (make_drawer_id_from_chunk), used miner.py:1381, format_miner.py:645 |
Idempotency probe + already_exists (probes parent and last chunk) |
mcp_server.py:2593-2604 |
filed_at stamped server-side, no override |
mcp_server.py:2580 |
Diary id recipe, suffix = sha256(entry)[:12] |
mcp_server.py:3510-3513 |
Triple id t_{s}_{p}_{o}_{sha256(valid_from|recorded_at)[:12]} |
ids.py:111-131, _HASH_TRUNC_TRIPLE = 12 at ids.py:37 |
add_triple guard scoped to open facts |
knowledge_graph.py:305-311 |
| Chunk size 800 | config.py:274 |
| Direct-write precedent preserving ids+metadata | migrate.py:326-330 |
| No join/replay/import tooling exists | cli.py subcommands; exporter.py emits markdown (lossy, not a join primitive); diary_ingest.py ingests daily-summary files, unrelated to agent diaries; migrate.py is single-palace chromadb recovery; dedup.py is cosine-similarity pruning within one source_file |
| Closets are miner-derived, no MCP write path | closet_llm.py:8-10 ("Regex closets are always created by the miner"); mcp_server.py:2913 exposes only _purge_source_closets |
| Two collections in one sqlite file | mempalace_drawers (14,778 rows) and mempalace_closets (1,560) in the archive, via segments→collections |