Transcript Backfill — From 1 Real Session to 28

Timeline

1. 1

   Start

   Charge received: expand transcript coverage

   Zeb: 'let's charge another session and see if we can go through a lot more of these sessions for data'

2. 2

   +10m

   Real data surveyed

   196 real local transcripts found spanning 2026-06-16 to 2026-07-18; confirmed no existing slug-to-uuid mapping exists anywhere

3. 3

   +20m

   Scoping question asked and answered

   Zeb: build the full matcher, backfill as many as reliably possible — not a small proof batch

4. 4

   +25m

   Crucible checkpoint asked and run

   Zeb confirmed this warranted Council review before mechanically editing 100+ sealed records

5. 5

   +40m

   Council converges on two corrections

   Same-day alone is insufficient; never mutate sealed session JSONs directly. Zeb: 'agreed on both counts'

6. 6

   +70m

   Matcher built with both corrections structural

   classifyFromScoredCandidates requires a content/duration signal beyond date; applyMatches writes only to a separate mapping file

7. 7

   +75m

   First dry run appears to hang

   Background bash task exceeded 120s with no output; killed and diagnosed rather than waited on indefinitely

8. 8

   +85m

   Root cause found: quadratic file re-reads

   loadRawSnippet was re-opening the same transcript file from disk on every one of up to 120 calls per candidate — fixed to read each file once

9. 9

   +95m

   Second real run: 19 seconds, clean results

   36 high_confidence, 123 ambiguous, 2 no_candidate — but two uuid collisions spotted by eye in the output

10. 10

    +100m

    Collision detection built and tested

    Two pairs of sessions (forgehome-intelligence/forgehome-recipe-book, forgekit-os-history-epilogue/forgekit-os-history-narrated-deck) both correctly downgraded to ambiguous

11. 11

    +110m

    Third bug found: _TEMPLATE.json swept in as a fake session

    no_candidate list included 'session-name-YYYY-MM-DD' — the schema template file's placeholder slug/date, caught before it could contaminate results

12. 12

    +115m

    Final dry run: 28 clean, non-colliding matches

    161 real sessions, 28 high_confidence, 131 ambiguous, 1 no_candidate, 1 already_linked

13. 13

    +120m

    Results presented, applied to the mapping file

    Zeb reviewed and approved; 28 matches written to a separate, never-sealed-JSON-touching file

14. 14

    +130m

    Source integrity independently verified for all 28

    25 complete, 3 with exactly 1 malformed line each (real but minor transcript artifacts), 0 broken chains, 0 errors — wired into the matcher itself as a --verify step, not a one-off manual check

What shipped

• forgekit-os/scripts/arc/match-transcripts.mjs — correlates session JSONs to real transcripts via same-day date (candidate filter) + content-keyword overlap + duration plausibility (mandatory disambiguation signals), with structural collision detection and _TEMPLATE.json exclusion

• classifyFromScoredCandidates — pure decision function proving same-day alone can never produce high_confidence, and multiple equally-strong candidates are never silently disambiguated

• resolveCollisions — downgrades BOTH sessions to ambiguous when two independently claim the same transcript uuid, never picks a winner

• verifyMapping / --verify CLI flag — checks every mapped transcript's real sourceIntegrity via the proven loadClaudeCodeTranscript parser and persists the result back into the mapping file

• forgekit-os/arc-interpretations/transcript-match-map.json — the separate, always-correctable mapping file (never the sealed session JSONs) recording 28 real matches with content scores, matched keywords, and verified source integrity

• npm run arc:match — CLI command (dry run by default, --apply to write, --verify to re-check integrity)

• 20 new tests covering the pure matching/collision/apply/verify logic — all passing (108/108 total across npm run test:os)