Palace Index Curator

---
name: palace-index-curator
description: Curate the web-capture index. Use when the capture backlog grows, captures sit unprocessed at seedling/pending, or to surface stored research during work.
alwaysApply: false
category: governance
tags:
- knowledge-management
- capture-index
- curation
- promotion
- analytics
dependencies:
- memory_palace.corpus.index_analytics
- memory_palace.corpus.index_promoter
---

# Palace Index Curator

## Overview

The web-research hooks auto-capture every WebFetch and WebSearch into
`hooks/memory-palace-index.yaml`, storing each as a markdown file and an
index entry. Captures land at the defaults `routing_type: pending`,
`maturity: seedling`, `importance_score: 50`, and nothing advances them.
Left alone, the index becomes a write-only graveyard: the majority of
entries are never incorporated, analyzed, or surfaced.

This skill drains that backlog and keeps it drained. It wires the
capture index to the corpus tooling the plugin already ships
(`decay_model`, `keyword_index`, `marginal_value`) through three
commands: a read-only report, a dry-run-first promotion engine, and a
SessionStart surfacing hook.

## When To Use

- A commit was blocked because the index still carries `pending`
  entries the drain held back.
- The capture backlog has grown and most entries are still `pending`.
- You want a corpus health report (inert ratio, orphans, topic clusters).
- You want stored research surfaced automatically during sessions.

## When NOT to Use

- Ingesting a single new resource: use `knowledge-intake`.
- Searching stored knowledge ad hoc: use `knowledge-locator`.
- Tending a digital garden file: use `digital-garden-cultivator`.

## Workflow

### 1. Analyze (read-only)

```bash
uv run python scripts/memory_palace_cli.py index report
```

Reports total entries, the inert ratio, orphaned captures (entries whose
backing file is gone), the largest topic clusters by domain, and the
top promotion candidates. Writes nothing.

### 2. Incorporate (dry-run, then apply)

```bash
# Dry run: prints promote/archive proposals, writes nothing.
uv run python scripts/memory_palace_cli.py index promote

# Apply: backs up the index under data/backups/, then persists.
uv run python scripts/memory_palace_cli.py index promote --apply
```

Each `pending` entry is classified into one action:

- **promote**: recent, authoritative, or clustered. Gets a real
  importance score, a routing type, and maturity `seedling -> growing`.
- **archive**: orphaned or older than the archive horizon and never
  revisited. Marked `archived` rather than promoted, following the
  principle that unused captures should drain, not accumulate.
- **hold**: everything else stays `pending` with no change.

Applying is idempotent: promoted and archived entries are no longer
`pending`, so a second run proposes nothing new. The dry-run diff is
always shown before `--apply` writes.

Running these by hand is the exception. `--apply` runs on every commit
from `scripts/precommit_palace_maintenance.sh`, so the backlog drains
continuously rather than in occasional sweeps. Reach for the commands
above when a commit is blocked, or when you want the dry-run diff before
the hook decides for you.

### 3. Committed state must be drained

The commit that carries the index must carry it with zero `pending`
entries. `scripts/check_capture_index_drained.py` runs at the end of the
maintenance hook and fails the commit otherwise, and
`tests/test_capture_index_artifact.py` re-checks the same invariant in
CI so a bypassed hook does not land a backlog.

Two things make that gate reachable rather than a standing block:

- The capture write stages the index
  (`hooks/shared/deduplication._stage_index`). Without it, pre-commit
  reverts the unstaged write before any hook runs, so the drain reads a
  tree the fresh capture is missing from and converges on a fixed point
  that excludes exactly the entries it exists to process. That is how 47
  captures accumulated behind a drain that reported nothing to do.
- The drain resolves promote and archive by itself. Only `hold` survives
  it, so a blocked commit means a specific capture needs a person to
  score or archive it. The gate names the keys.

### 4. Surface (learn)

A SessionStart hook (`hooks/index_surfacer.py`) names the highest-value
promoted captures at the start of a session. It is disabled by default.
Enable it in `memory-palace-config.yaml`:

```yaml
feature_flags:
  context_injection: true
```

The hook only speaks when promoted entries clear the importance floor,
and it exits silently on any error so it can never block a session.

## The corpus keyword index is a separate artifact

The three steps above all operate on the capture index at
`hooks/memory-palace-index.yaml`. Retrieval reads a different file:
`data/indexes/keyword-index.yaml`, built from the staging captures and
consumed by `cache_lookup`. Curating one does nothing to the other.

That keyword index is derived data and is not tracked in git, so a
fresh checkout has none at all. Rebuild it with:

```bash
# Report what would be indexed, writing nothing.
uv run python scripts/build_indexes.py --dry-run

# Write data/indexes/keyword-index.yaml.
uv run python scripts/build_indexes.py
```

The builder refuses to write an empty index over a populated one. An
empty corpus is reported with `"wrote": false` and any existing index
is left untouched. Writing `entries: {}` over real data is how the
corpus went dark in 1.5.0, and it stayed dark because the regeneration
script named in that stub file had never been written.

## When a capture is missing from search

A capture whose frontmatter will not parse contributes nothing to the
keyword index. Body extraction is gated on that parse, so the whole
document drops out rather than just its topic, and the drain above
reports nothing wrong because the index entry itself looks ordinary.

The usual cause is a page title or search query holding a double
quote, which closed the YAML scalar early when the capture was
written. The capture hooks escape their scalars now, so this reaches
captures written before that fix and no others.

```bash
# Report which captures cannot be parsed, writing nothing.
uv run python scripts/repair_capture_frontmatter.py

# Re-quote them, backing the originals up under data/backups/.
uv run python scripts/repair_capture_frontmatter.py --apply
```

The repair rewrites the broken scalar and nothing else, and refuses
any file it cannot re-parse afterward: turning an invisible capture
into a subtly wrong one is worse than leaving it alone. Rebuild the
keyword index once it has run, since retrieval reads the separate
artifact described above.

## Design Notes

- Promotion uses only structural signals (recency, domain authority,
  cluster size). The decision logic is deterministic. No model call
  gates a transition.
- The decay half-lives (14/30/90 days) are tunable priors, not retention
  constants. Wixted & Ebbesen (1997) and Murre & Dros (2015) show
  forgetting follows a power law. FSRS (Ye, Su & Cao, 2022) validates
  exponential decay only with a learned per-item half-life. Calibrate
  against reopen logs if usage data accrues.
- Retrieval stays keyword-first (`cache_lookup` / `keyword_index`), and
  embeddings are not required at the current corpus scale. BM25 is the
  workhorse up to ~5000 documents. Embeddings add value only for
  vocabulary-mismatch discovery.
- Near-duplicate detection layers SHA-256 exact match (present via
  `content_hash`) then MinHash with k-shingling for near-duplicates
  (Broder, 1997). SimHash is preferable only at tens of thousands of
  documents.
- Importance formula: `relevance = w1 * centrality + w2 * decay(t) +
  w3 * usage`. The plugin ships all three terms (`graph_analyzer`
  PageRank, `decay_model`, `usage_tracker`).

## Archiving Completed Work

Triage decides whether a single capture drains or accumulates. When a
whole body of work finishes, freeze it behind an index instead of
deleting it or leaving it in the active listing.

See `modules/archive-pattern.md` for the structure, the closing-note
requirement, and the two discoverability layers.

## Exit Criteria

- [ ] `build_indexes.py --dry-run` reports a non-zero entry count and
      leaves `data/indexes/keyword-index.yaml` byte-identical.
- [ ] `build_indexes.py` against an empty corpus reports `"wrote":
      false` and leaves an existing populated index untouched.
- [ ] `index report` runs and prints the inert ratio and orphan count
      for the live index.
- [ ] `index promote` (no flag) prints proposals and writes nothing
      (the index file is byte-identical afterward).
- [ ] `index promote --apply` creates a timestamped backup under
      `data/backups/` before persisting, and a re-run proposes nothing.
- [ ] With `context_injection: true`, a SessionStart event surfaces the
      top promoted captures, and with the flag off it stays silent.
- [ ] Failure modes (missing index, corrupt YAML, missing backing files)
      are handled without raising: report degrades, promote holds, hook
      exits silently.
- [ ] `check_capture_index_drained.py` exits 0 against the committed
      index and exits 1 naming the keys when one is left `pending`.
- [ ] `repair_capture_frontmatter.py` reports zero repairable
      captures against the committed corpus, and refuses a file it
      cannot re-parse after repair.
- [ ] A capture written by `update_index` appears in `git diff --cached`
      without anyone staging it by hand.