Slice 2 of the adopt-or-build plan. A recurring mission's hard problem is
not running the agent — that is 23 seconds — it is knowing what it did
last time. This repository already tried continuous research once:
migrations 0030-0044 built research_topics/loops, 0053 dropped them all,
and the reason they could not survive is that research_topics carried a
status lifecycle but no seen-set. It could run forever and never know
what it had covered.
Two kinds of row, because the real vault forced it. The plan assumed
notes carry arxiv:/doi:/url: frontmatter. Measured against the actual
valhalla-vault: 416 notes, 145 with frontmatter, and ZERO with any of
those keys — the dominant keys are repo-sync metadata (node, org, gitea)
and course fields (presenter, session). An ingester keyed only on
external identity would have indexed nothing, which is the same shape of
failure as everything else found this week. So `note` rows record
coverage (keyed by path) and `source` rows record consumption (keyed by
natural id); a continuous mission needs both.
Two decisions the data forced:
- `source:` is deliberately NOT an identity key. The vault uses it for
local paths of course material (/Users/quantum/Downloads/...), which is
provenance, not citable identity. Accepting it would fill the seen-set
with 25 rows keyed on a laptop path.
- The hash covers the body, not the whole file. Repo-sync notes rewrite
updated:/size_kb: on every sync without the prose changing; hashing the
file would report 103 phantom edits per run and make "unchanged"
meaningless.
Authoritative in Postgres rather than ZeroClaw memory, per the Slice 1
spike: memory is agent-scoped and mission agents are ephemeral
claw_<uuid> aliases (~100 already present). A seen-set that disappears
with the agent that wrote it is not a seen-set. The spike did find that
POST /api/memory upserts by key, so mirroring content there later would
inherit idempotence for free if keyed by source_id.
Verified against the live 416-note vault, not a fixture:
PASS1 { scanned: 416, inserted: 416, updated: 0, unchanged: 0 }
PASS2 { scanned: 416, inserted: 0, updated: 0, unchanged: 416 }
382 tests, clippy clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
