Build Log · July 2, 2026
Known's second pillar: from an anecdote to the Behavior Loop
Zeb and Court walked through Guide 1 and found the Known Card was the only feature with an obvious reason to return — this session found the second one, first from a hypothetical (rejected) and then from the brain corpus itself (kept).
- Known
- Design
- Research
- Crucible
- Crucible Council runs (one mechanically broken, one real)
- 2
- brain corpus documents read in full to find the real signal
- 3
- design doc written, then substantially rewritten in place
- 1
- code changed — design-only session
- 0
Crucible Council runs (one mechanically broken, one real)
brain corpus documents read in full to find the real signal
design doc written, then substantially rewritten in place
code changed — design-only session
Timeline
Start
The gap named
Zeb + Court walkthrough of Guide 1 found the Known Card is the one clear feature; no second reason to return surfaced
+20m
First Council run misfires
GPT reviewed the Known Card as an artifact instead of answering the a/b/c/d question — persona args weren't reaching the script correctly
+35m
Sharpened Charge, mechanical bug found
npm arg-passing bug identified (personas landed in wrong argv slot, silently fell back to COUNCIL_DEFAULT); fixed by passing personas as a distinct shell argument
+45m
Council lands, output is generic
Correct personas ran but surfaced only boilerplate ("automate data capture") — synthesized manually instead of trusting the raw output
+60m
Guide 4 v1 written
Day-history-as-pattern-recognition, three-tier design with false-positive-prevention machinery, anchored on an invented example ("Sinatra worked 4 of 5 times")
+75m
Zeb redirects
Corrected Court's relationship (wife, not mother-in-law), rejected the single-anecdote anchor, named the brain/research corpus as the actual north star
+95m
Corpus read in full
source-extractions.md, dementia-home-care-corridor.md, public-care-wisdom-corpus.md read end to end — found convergent, source-verified signal on repeated questions/Behavior Loop that the anecdote-driven design never touched
End
Guide 4 rewritten as v2
Behavior Loop established as the real second pillar, reusing existing schema seams (portraitEntries.category already anticipates 'confused'), day-history demoted to a supporting feature
What shipped
docs/known/guides/guide-04-pattern-recognition.md — full design doc for Known's second pillar, written twice in the same session (v1 rejected, v2 kept)
v2 establishes the Behavior Loop (capture what recurs, once, per situation; retrieve it fast in the moment) as the second pillar, replacing v1's day-history-as-pattern-recognition
v2 is grounded in three brain corpus documents (source-extractions.md Source 12, dementia-home-care-corridor.md Domain 5/9, public-care-wisdom-corpus.md Pattern 1) instead of a hypothetical example
Identified that lib/db/schema.ts's portraitEntries.category comment already anticipates a 'confused' category value — nobody built the capture/retrieval flow around it yet
No code changed — this is a design artifact for next session's build
“What does it suggest that will keep us in bounds of what shows to be truly important. That is our north star for this, not one person.”