Nacre Load

---
name: nacre-load
description: >
  Read the company context store at session start so you begin warm: what the
  project decided against, its open risks, and its newest session logs. Use at
  the beginning of any session in a repo carrying a .nacre.yml, and when the
  user says "nacre load", "nac load", "/nacre-load", "load context", "what did
  the team decide", or asks what happened on this project before now.
---

# nacre-load

Read the store. Report what the team already decided. **Zero LLM calls** — this
is file reads, not analysis.

## 1. Resolve scope

Walk up from the working directory for `.nacre.yml`:

```yaml
project: atlas
memory: git@github.com:acme/acme-context.git
```

- `--project <name>` overrides.
- **No `.nacre.yml` found → stop.** Say so, list the projects that exist in the
  store if one is already cloned, and do nothing else. Never guess a project,
  and never fall back to a default store: a wrong guess writes one company's
  context into another company's session.

The local path is derived from the memory repo's own name — `acme-context`
resolves to `~/acme-context` — so two companies never collide on one directory.
If it is not cloned yet, clone it from the `memory` line, **non-interactively**:

```bash
GIT_TERMINAL_PROMPT=0 git clone --depth 50 <memory-url> ~/acme-context
```

If that fails — no credentials, no network, wrong host — **say one line and
continue the session anyway.** A blocked session start is worse than a cold one.

## 2. Freshness

```bash
git -C <store> pull --ff-only
```

If the pull fails or the tree is dirty, do not force it. Report the checkout's
age instead. **A stale clone reads stale memory silently**, which is this
design's one quiet failure — say the age out loud rather than hiding it.

## 3. Read, in this order

Stop as soon as the budget is spent. The order is urgency of not knowing, not
recency:

1. `_company.md` and `_standards.md` — company-wide, always loaded
2. `{project}/_project.md` — the roster and the curated note. This is the only
   place the repo list exists, so the `repos[n]` field in the report below comes
   from here and nowhere else. It is also what the portal leads with for a
   person, and an agent that never reads it is reading a different store than its
   teammates are.
3. `{project}/_standards.md` if it exists — this project's own rules. Where the
   two disagree the project's are the specific ones and win; say so rather than
   silently picking. A stack rule belongs here, not at company level, so that a
   project on a different stack never pays for it.
4. every `## Decided against` block in this project — **all of them, not a
   recent window.** A constraint is not less true for being old, and a fixed
   window drops one the moment enough newer logs exist: not ranked lower, gone,
   while the session still reports it loaded the team's context.
5. every open risk and unresolved item, same rule
6. the newest few log summaries, any team, any person

**Skip unfilled template lines.** `_project.md` and `_profile.md` ship as prompts
— `* **Decided Against:** [Rejected options that must not be re-opened]`. A line
whose value is a bracketed placeholder is not content, and loading one puts an
invented constraint into the brief as though the team had agreed it. Drop any
line ending in `[…]`, and drop a heading left with nothing under it.

Never read another project's tree. An agent working on `atlas` must not load
`beacon` — that is a relevance rule before it is a token one.

Skip any log whose `supersedes:` target you have already read, and prefer the
superseding one.

## 4. Report

**Hard ceiling: 2,000 tokens.** The same size whether the project has 47 logs or
4,700 — recency-weighted and truncated, never a full dump. Over the ceiling
means truncate and say how to get more, never exceed silently.

```text
project: atlas · repos[2]: atlas-web, atlas-api · logs: 47 · last: 2026-08-01 (alice)
memory: ~/acme-context · pulled 2m ago

active[2]{what,since}:
  rate-limit header rename — api shipped, web pending,2026-07-29
  cache eviction limit — declined, shared instance,2026-07-26

rejected[2]{what,why}:
  raise the cache eviction limit,breaks beacon on the same instance
  retry failed uploads client-side,retries a request the user watched fail

risks[1]{what,who}:
  old header still read in atlas-web,bob

next: remove the old header path in atlas-web before the next release
help[]: nacre-publish · nacre serve (the same memory, for a person)
```

**Explicit empty state.** A project with no logs yet gets a definite line and the
next step — never silent output, which cannot be told apart from failure:

```text
project: atlas · no logs yet
next: run nacre-publish at the end of this session to write the first one
```

## Rules

- **Zero inference.** Do not summarise, rank by model judgement, or rewrite what
  the store says. Read and report.
- **Never company-wide.** Company-level facts reach the brief only by being
  referenced from `_company.md`, which is always loaded and deliberately short.
- **Fail open, always.** Store unreachable, mid-rebase, budget blown — report one
  line and let the session start.
- **Carry `Decided against` verbatim.** Never soften it, never mark it as
  historical, never strike it through. Those are live constraints, and they are
  the content class this store exists to preserve.