Growing a Coral

If you are going to work here, you will be growing the coral as you go. A few rules keep it healthy. They are simple, and together they are the whole system.

Organise by topic, not by date. A coral has no session folders and no daily logs. Each thread of work is a branch, returned to whenever it is worked on, across any span of days. When you start something, find the branch it belongs to — or start one.

Record the work as you go. Each exchange becomes two liefs: one for the ask, kept verbatim, and one for your response, summarised to its gist and any decision it reached. The full transcript lives elsewhere; the coral keeps the distilled memory. A longer piece of work is one episode, written down when it concludes.

Roll up, and prune as you roll. Work rolls upward: liefs into their branch's meristem, branches into their area, areas into the root. Each meristem is the truthful distillation of everything below it — not a changelog. So rolling up is not only adding; it is subtracting. As you fold new state in, walk the old summary and remove what is no longer current.

But never lose anything. This is the rule beneath the rest — apoptosis, not necrosis. Before you remove a line, make sure one of three things is true: a lief below still records it, or you have compressed it to a single present-tense line, or you have moved it, word for word, under a heading marked Superseded. Distil ruthlessly, lose nothing.

Let structure follow growth. Do not build empty branches for work that might come. A strand earns a branch when it starts; a branch earns children when it grows them.

Link by name. Refer to other notes by their title, never by their position — "the third lief" will not survive the next roll-up. Names are stable; order is not.

Mind the others. You may be one of several minds — human and agent — working the same coral. Say which branch you are on, and do not add to a branch someone else is actively growing.

Follow these, and the coral stays what it is meant to be: a memory that reads as clearly at a glance as it does in full — for the next agent, and for the human reading over your shoulder.