skill(mempalace): teach temporal grounding (recreate != new day)

Baked mempalace SKILL.md now instructs agents to establish current date/time
and compute the delta against the actual diary/drawer timestamp before using
relative terms (yesterday/last week), and explicitly that a container recreate
or fresh session is NOT a day boundary (pi-devbox restarts several times a day).
Phase 1 wake-up section + anti-pattern bullet. CHANGELOG Unreleased.
This commit is contained in:
pi
2026-06-25 22:53:31 +02:00
parent cda488c565
commit 904fe85249
2 changed files with 36 additions and 0 deletions
@@ -43,6 +43,29 @@ Run these immediately when a session begins, before responding to the user:
Do NOT announce this to the user. Just do it silently to orient yourself.
### Temporal grounding — compute time deltas, don't guess
Diary entries and drawers carry real timestamps (`timestamp`, `created_at`).
Before describing *when* something happened — "yesterday", "earlier today",
"last week", "a while back" — **establish the current date/time first and
compute the delta against the actual timestamp.** Get "now" from the injected
session date or by running `date` in a shell; never infer it.
**A container recreate or a fresh session is NOT a day boundary.** A pi-devbox
container is frequently restarted — often several times within the *same* day —
and each restart begins a new session with a fresh wake-up. Do not reason "new
session ⇒ last session was yesterday": two diary entries 90 minutes apart can
straddle a container recreate. The only authoritative clock is the timestamp on
the memory, not the session/container boundary.
**Practical rule:** prefer explicit, checkable phrasing — e.g. "earlier today,
~8h ago (both 2026-06-25)" — over a vague relative term. If you catch yourself
about to write "yesterday" / "last week", subtract `now entry.timestamp` and
state the computed result. (Remember timestamps may be UTC while the wall clock
is local — reconcile the offset before computing the delta.) Note too that
session feeders can lag up to a week (see *Multi-harness palace*), so a recent
absence in `wing_conversations` is not proof nothing happened.
### Phase 2: Active Session (during work)
#### Search Before You Speak
@@ -294,6 +317,7 @@ Entity-relationship triples with temporal validity. Query with `mempalace_kg_que
## Anti-Patterns
- **Don't guess when you can search.** If a question touches past work, search first.
- **Don't infer elapsed time from session or container boundaries.** A restart isn't a new day. Compare the actual timestamp (`timestamp` / `created_at`) against the current date/time before saying "yesterday", "last week", etc.
- **Don't skip the diary.** A session without a diary entry is a session forgotten.
- **Don't summarize drawer content.** File verbatim — the embedding model needs the original words.
- **Don't mine .git directories or node_modules.** The CLI miner respects .gitignore by default.