Lorekeeper

Provenance and ownership

Two records Lorekeeper keeps: where a note came from, and whose file it is.

Provenance and file ownership in a Lorekeeper brain Two parts. One: provenance. Four stages sit in a row — an external artifact such as an article, a video, a talk or a thread; sources/, holding the raw capture and where it came from; notes/, what you made of it in your own words; and entities/, the projects, areas and people a note concerns. The links between them are drawn beneath the row and they run backwards: a `derived_from` link points from notes/ to sources/, and another from sources/ to the external artifact, each naming the origin it was derived from. One `about` link runs the other way, from notes/ to entities/. So provenance points backwards, from the derived artifact to its origin, and adding a note never edits the source it came from, while aboutness points forward to the project, area or person a note concerns. Frontmatter is authoritative for both. Two: ownership. A manifest at .lorekeeper/manifest.json inside your brain records two classes of file. The toolkit's files are the starter files `lore init` wrote, AGENTS.md among them, and these can be updated. Yours are everything else, and they are never rewritten, moved or reformatted. Absence is a statement: a file the manifest does not list is yours by definition, which is a positive statement of ownership rather than missing information. A toolkit file you edited is reported as drifted rather than overwritten, and adopting a vault you already have is adoption, not migration. Where a note came from, and who owns it Links point from the derived artifact back to its origin, and a manifest says which files are the toolkit's. 1 · PROVENANCE An external artifact an article, a video, a talk, a thread sources/ the raw capture and where it came from notes/ what you made of it, in your own words entities/ the projects, areas, and people it concerns derived_from derived_from about Provenance points backwards, from the derived artifact to its origin, so adding a note never edits the source it came from. Aboutness points forward, to the project, area, or person a note concerns. Frontmatter is authoritative for both. 2 · OWNERSHIP The manifest .lorekeeper/manifest.json The toolkit's the starter files lore init wrote, AGENTS.md among them. These can be updated. Yours everything else — never rewritten, moved, or reformatted. Absence is a statement A file the manifest does not list is yours by definition. That is a positive statement of ownership, not missing information. A toolkit file you edited is reported as drifted, not overwritten. Adopting a vault you already have is adoption, not migration. One manifest, inside your brain, and no second record anywhere to reconcile against it.

Where a note came from

A captured source carries a stable id in its frontmatter:

---
id: url-e0d9f22837c9
created: 2026-09-25T15:35:07+00:00
url: "https://example.com/queue-semantics-talk"
---

https://example.com/queue-semantics-talk

A note you write from it names that id in derived_from:

---
derived_from:
  - url-e0d9f22837c9
---

# Consumer leases

A consumer that holds a batch longer than its lease loses the partition.
  • The link points backwards, from what was derived to what it came from. Writing a note never edits the source it came from, and the reverse link is never stored.
  • It names an id, not a path. Rename or move the source file and the link still resolves.
  • Absence is not a claim. A note with no derived_from has an origin that is unknown or unrecorded. That never means the thought was your own.
  • about points the other way, forward to the project, area or person a note concerns. It is provisional in v0.1.

Frontmatter is the authority for both. Links written in the body are not read as provenance.

Whose file it is

.lorekeeper/manifest.json lists every file the toolkit wrote. A file not on that list is yours by definition: not listing a file is a positive statement of ownership, not missing information.

  • The toolkit's files are the starter files lore init wrote, and the captures it filed. Only these can ever be updated by the toolkit.
  • Your files are everything else. They are never rewritten, moved or reformatted.
  • A toolkit file you edited is reported as modified and left as you wrote it. lore does not overwrite it.

Before any write, lore reads the manifest. If the manifest is missing, or anything in it is ambiguous, lore refuses and writes nothing rather than guessing.