Work

Experimental workshop space. Purpose-driven working artifacts that haven't codified into notes yet.

Each workshop is a directory exploring a specific workflow end-to-end: from question through sourcing and extraction to finished notes. The goal is to discover what patterns actually emerge from use, rather than designing structure upfront.

Active Workshops

  • execution-channel-compatibility — cataloguing how operating system, shell, agent runtime, environment inheritance, and tool availability affect executable instructions; compilation is one option alongside runtime environment propagation, dispatch shims, portable entry points, paired procedures, and standardized execution environments
  • description-length-optimization — determining the shortest description allowance that preserves correct read/skip decisions across plausible hits and large scoped slices, then deriving the validator policy from retrieval quality and an explicit pointer-context budget
  • self-improvement-cluster-operationalization — turning the self-improving-systems cluster into methodology that guides Commonplace's own changes: close the theory's ambiguities first, then audit existing instructions and behavioral-authority artifacts (code, type specs, validators, contracts) against it; also decides the authority-path mix (wired, user-invoked, link-mediated)
  • exo-methodology-pitch — whether Exo needs an explicit, improvable theory for deciding which experiences deserve promotion into examples, natural-language conclusions, skills, tests, or code, and whether the selected semantic conclusions repay their maintenance costs
  • connect-report-mining — mining the 45 connect reports from the last two weeks plus kb/log.md for recurring synthesis/gap patterns no single connect run surfaces
  • chatbot-goal-state — whether the computational-model notes need a second shape besides the goal-fixed tool loop, for conversations where the human's later messages revise the goal itself rather than supplying tool output; benchmark-construction implications are a downstream thread
  • db-native-reflective-system — what a complete DB-native content/type/link/review schema would need for a hypothetical Commonplace-like reflective self-improving system, starting from the freshness store as a skeleton; does not re-litigate Commonplace's own files-over-database decision
  • theory-methodology-derivation — the two-layer theory↔methodology pattern (derived fast path, fallback to the generator, promotion by matching) and whether "derivation" should restructure the distillation vocabulary; framings from cognitive architectures, inductive bias, and effective theories in physics
  • freshness-module-review — code review of src/commonplace/freshness/; the live finding is that commonplace-freshness-accept ships as a command that can never succeed, alongside latent CAS/normalization asymmetries and a selector that re-hashes each criterion once per note
  • extensible-controlled-vocabularies — designing how a code-enforced closed enum becomes open-ended per installed KB while staying validator-checkable; the trigger case (snapshot genre, formerly ingest-report source_type) shipped with a severity-warn floor (ADR 045), the structured vocabulary-file layer and source-tier remain open
  • authority-ranking — testing whether source authority is a linear rank at all (partial order, domain-conditional, time-varying, non-additive under independence) and what consumers a ranking function actually has; framework-side companion to the epistack author-dossier casework
  • lineage-mechanisms — designing one derived-artifact lineage vocabulary across multiple storage weights; review keeps its purpose-built DB while generic lineage state stays deferred until a second churning mesh earns it
  • linking-contract-consistency — reconciling stale linking ADRs, collection-local grammars, asymmetric label directions, reciprocal-link procedures, semantic validation, and inbound-link delivery while leaving derivation lineage to the lineage workshop
  • linking-foundations — grounding authored links in argumentation, inferentialism, explanation and mechanism, discourse/relevance theory, and semantic-memory research; separates assertion, reader function, strength, revision consequence, and derived association before further vocabulary decisions
  • src-architecture-alternatives — alternative architectures for src/commonplace/ from a full code read; active thread is an append-only event log as review-store source of truth with acceptance events that embed their snapshots
  • relocation-move-map-engine — collapsing note and directory relocation around one move-map engine for link rewriting, file moves, redirects, and removal of review-store rekeying
  • kb-graph-loader — testing whether validation, generated indexes, docs hooks, and review targeting should share one loaded KB note/graph model
  • artifact-freshness-and-referential-checks — building artifact-neutral dependency baselines and reverse selection on the shipped review and full-pass version cases; the second consumer decides what comparison/guard code deserves extraction
  • agent-note-improvement — testing instructions that help agents improve weak existing notes by comparing an older weak revision against a later accepted revision
  • agent-memory-design — continuation workshop for discussing revisions and companion artifacts around kb/notes/designing-agent-memory-systems.md
  • bulk-operations — generalizing deep research, review reruns, connect triage, source refresh, validation sweeps, and corpus migrations into a reusable target-selection, sharding, execution, merge-back, and validation pattern
  • runner-execution-profiles — cataloguing model, effort, runner, isolation, and escalation policy across skills and delegated roles, then defining configurable Codex/Claude execution profiles for faster and cheaper workflows
  • pi-agent-zerostack-comparison — preparing a code-grounded comparison instruction for the two Rust coding-agent CLIs cloned under related-systems/
  • vocabulary-governance — deciding how global, collection-local, and type-specific vocabularies should be declared and used by shipped KBs
  • aris-full-trial — running a private full-ARIS paper-production trial while keeping only framing and lessons learned in the public KB
  • review-bundle-packing — measuring and deciding whether review prompts must stay bundle-local or may pack multiple bundles into one run
  • validation — making validation a reliable part of the workflow: when, what, and how to validate (hooks, skill upgrades, periodic revalidation)
  • obsidian-affordances — deciding which Obsidian-facing affordances are useful compatibility layers versus representation drift for a repo-native KB
  • philosophy-borrowing — evaluating Peirce's abduction, Quine's web of belief, speech-act theory, and Carnap's explication as operational borrowings for KB methodology
  • agent-complexity-theory — formal consequences of the bounded-context orchestration model; candidate theorem sketches for academic collaboration
  • semantic-search-replacement — evaluating whether to replace qmd as the semantic-search layer, and with what
  • latent-space-generation-without-training — exploring whether embedding-guided novelty-generation papers can become a practical no-large-training workflow
  • review-revise-gated — finding review/revise arrangements that reliably produce the manual-edit quality bar, then codifying as reusable instructions
  • auditable-llm-editing — testing whether sparse, anchored writing state prevents accidental claim drift across repeated LLM editing passes
  • distributing-built-kbs — downstream counterpart to ADR 021's Commonplace-library shipping model: most hassle-free way to distribute a domain KB someone built, by separating the lightweight consumer path from the authoring machinery
  • lifecycle-management — mapping the full artifact life-cycle (intake, promotion, maturation, retirement); the agent-memory-design test case landed as a note + synthesis trait in kb/notes/designing-agent-memory-systems.md; the proposal disposal half shipped 2026-07-25 as ADR 056 (extract, then archive out of the frontier as a link sink), leaving note and source-snapshot retirement as the blocking gaps
  • condensation-faithfulness-experiment — designing an experiment to test whether our condensation methodology (write conventions + gate suite) produces more behaviorally faithful memory than naive auto-summary, using the Faithful Self-Evolvers perturbation protocol

Complete file listing (generated at build time)