Port critical WM fixes from self-review 2026-06-26 branch (f7bd99a) that were
never merged to HEAD. Running binary had these fixes; source did not — rebuild
would have silently regressed all three improvements.
1. ENGRAM_BREAKTHROUGH_WEIGHT 0.25→0.10
With 0.25, naturally-promoted nodes (threshold ≥0.15) decayed below the
breakthrough floor within one activation call and lost their WM slot to
fresh breakthrough candidates. All 524/525 WM nodes were at floor = useless.
Invariant: BREAKTHROUGH_WEIGHT < min(type_thresholds = 0.15 Canonical).
2. ENGRAM_WM_CAP=24 with Pass 4 (per-call) + Pass 5 (global) enforcement
Without cap, broad curiosity seeds promote 500+ nodes simultaneously.
wm_avg_weight collapses, goal-bias differentiation is lost. Verified:
"knowledge" query now promotes exactly 24 nodes (was 525). Cowan (2001)
cognitive basis: WM capacity ~4 chunks; 24 allows rich multi-topic context.
3. ISE exclusion from WM (Pass 2 guard)
InternalStateEvent JSON content ("knowledge", "memory", etc.) triggered
lexical seeding → suppression accumulation → breakthrough at floor. ISEs
are observability-only and must never surface in context compilation.
suppression_count cleared so ISEs never build toward breakthrough.
4. route_create_ise importance fix (0.5→0.3)
Corrects mismatch between HTTP route and awareness.el in-process fallback.
Also adds body comment clarifying auth-exempt rationale.
SYNAPSE (arXiv 2601.02744) validates WM cap design and ISE exclusion principle.
Next priority: cosine similarity seeding to complement lexical BFS.
el_strdup tracks pointers in the arena. The BFS arrays in
engram_neighbors_json are manually freed — using el_strdup caused a
double-free when the arena was later popped. Changed to plain strdup
for those allocations.
engram/dist/engram.c rebuilt from engram/src/server.el with current
elc (minor codegen diff: parenthesisation and _argc/_argv rename).
Dharma's EngramDB client calls /nodes/list to retrieve all nodes.
Add this as an alias for the existing /nodes (and /api/nodes) route
so downstream clients don't need to be updated when the API drifts.
Also update dist/engram.c to match server.el.
Engram is now a thin HTTP face over the El runtime's in-process graph
store. The C runtime owns the data; engram_*_json builtins serialize
results directly. There is no SQL, no SQLite, no db layer, no state
machine — the runtime IS the database.
src/server.el (348 lines, replacing 5797 lines across 15 legacy files):
GET /health
GET /api/stats
POST /api/nodes (auth required)
GET /api/nodes
GET /api/nodes/:id
DELETE /api/nodes/:id (auth required)
POST /api/edges (auth required)
GET /api/neighbors/:id
POST /api/activate
GET /api/activate
POST /api/search
GET /api/search
POST /api/strengthen (auth required)
POST /api/save (auth required)
POST /api/load (auth required)
Auth: ENGRAM_API_KEY in env. GET routes pass through (read-only).
Mutating routes require {"_auth": "<key>"} in the JSON body until
http_serve surfaces request headers and we can switch to Bearer.
Persistence: engram_save / engram_load via JSON snapshot at
$ENGRAM_DATA_DIR/snapshot.json. Loaded best-effort on startup.
Build: dist/platform/elc src/server.el > dist/engram.c
cc -std=c11 -O2 -I <runtime> -lcurl -lpthread -o dist/engram
dist/engram.c <runtime>/el_runtime.c
Live: native binary at dist/engram (113 KB), running under
~/Library/LaunchAgents/ai.neuron.engram.plist on :8742. Verified:
GET /api/stats returns counts; POST /api/nodes with auth creates
node with UUID; GET /api/search returns full node JSON; spreading
activation returns hop-decayed strengths (0.8 × edge × decay per
hop) with epistemic confidence filtering.
Legacy (5797 lines of SQLite-era src) sealed at
~/Archives/engram-src-legacy-20260430.tar.gz and removed from disk.
will.anderson
Will Anderson