The docs described a mind made of subsystems — a grounding subsystem, a wonder
manifest, a dreamer on a beat, faculties as arguments to one call. Each of those
is a supervisor invented for something that should be a property of the
substrate, and two of the documents carrying them are load-bearing for a build
agent: cognitive-architecture.design.md says "a build agent executes from this
doc", and tools/api-reshape/README.md marks the refuted shapes PROVEN on a live
clone.
Corrections carried, per lang/spec/correspondence-and-censorship.md (PR #149)
and lang/spec/runtime-ownership.md:
- Grounding is not a subsystem — it IS the edge weight. grounded-by as a
relation type should not exist; grounding is a property of a relation, not a
relation between nodes. Never computed on demand.
- Faculties are operations, not parameters. reason changes the estimate, induce
changes the parameters, abduce changes the structure — a write, which
GeoGradient cannot express. A write is not a parameter of a read.
- Wonder is the boundary, not a manifest. Curiosity is wonder crystallized at a
nucleation site: one thing at two phases. Removed wonder from the operator
table in AGENTS.md.
- Consolidation is ambient, not scheduled. A brain has no cron job. The presence
of a ticker is the diagnostic.
- co_registration is deprecated — it averaged a per-edge property into a region
scalar, so opposing sites cancelled. GeoEdge.discord replaces it. Nothing new
may read it.
- In an immutable substrate, any mechanism that refuses a write is either
redundant with immutability or an epistemic constraint misfiled as a
protective one.
The two design docs are marked superseded-in-part with the refutation at the
point each claim is made, not rewritten. Preserving what was argued down is the
point of an immutable record.
Also measured and corrected while verifying the above: engram/README.md
documented a Rust engram-core crate on sled with "flat cosine scan until scale
demands HNSW" — there is no Rust in engram/ and HNSW is the index; lang/releases/
no longer exists, so both README.md and AGENTS.md pointed at a deleted path for
the authored runtime; language.md listed the engram_* and http_* runtimes as
stubs. Added language.md §20 for geometry-as-a-value, realizers and transduce
(#144), which had landed with no spec coverage.
Documentation only. No .c, .h, or .el file is touched.
AGENTS.md: root-level guide to the repo — which of the 8 el_runtime.c
copies is the one canonical, authored source (lang/releases/v1.0.0-20260501,
despite the misleading 'releases/' name) vs. lagging forks/build artifacts,
build commands, and session protocol.
engram/spec/architecture-hardening.design.md: terse engineering anchor for
the 2026-08-14 hardening vision (one calculus over the geometry, core +
ephemeral ring, persistence earned by salience, incarnation model) —
indexes the fuller whitepaper + Neuron artifact 2b8078cf rather than
restating them.
engram/spec/engram-db-tooling-design.md: high-level design for engram DB
tooling (geometry-native browse/query/ops surface over the existing
vantage-read/write/relate/supersede API).
Deliberately leaves out of this commit: the uncommitted el_runtime.c/h +
codegen.el float-arithmetic-codegen diff in this worktree, which appears
to overlap with (or supersede) the fix already preserved via PR #104 —
needs manual reconciliation rather than a second competing PR. Also
leaves out lang/.promote-backup-floatfix/ (a local backup snapshot,
confirms that float-fix work is mid-promotion here), assorted .DS_Store
files, engram/dist/engram.* backup binaries, and lang/dist backup
binaries — none of it source.
LTP/LTD-style belief grounding propagated along graph edges, with
union-find independence-guarded corroboration. Package: core C algorithm
(gep_core.h), a self-contained deterministic proof harness with recorded
output, staged runtime integration, and gated .el patches for the beat
hook and HTTP route.
Per the author's own LEDGER.md: built + proven on a clone, GATED pending
the engine/HNSW cutover — not wired into the live beat or routes.
Preserved here as a spec/reference artifact, not a request to merge into
the live path.
The buildable form of the "one operation" theory (memory bdc8a488). Maps the
theory onto what is already compiled: the five reasoning operators in
engram_reason.c already collapse onto ONE primitive — engram_reason_point_fit —
plus the geo-algebra (combine/subtract/analogy-rotate/distance), and
engram_verify.c is built on the same fit. So the operator-collapse is already
half-written; what is missing is not the primitive.
What is missing, and what this doc specifies:
- think(anchor, prior) -> gradient (a distribution/direction, not a point); each
named faculty = {point_fit + a prior}, the operation frozen, the prior learned.
- Prior as a first-class stored node (warp + calibration), superseding the
intrinsic importance/salience scalar with a relational, grounded-for-whom edge.
Confirmed against the runtime: importance is already a live activation
computation (el_runtime.c:13013), never trusted as a static field.
- vantage_read(anchor, aperture) — one op, three settings: self / foreign-field /
veil.
- The reflexive correspondence-loop as the learning engine: move the grounding
check from offline Python into the geometry, reflexive, reusing the DORMANT
verifier (engram_verify_grounding has no runtime caller and no El binding today)
turned inward. grounding = learning = one loop.
- hold/ground/assert kept distinct: the engram holds anything, grounding is an
edge, the honesty floor is on assertion only; ungrounded content is first-class.
- metastability: keystone core (read-mostly priors) + plastic everything else.
Seven staged milestones, earliest is a real end-to-end slice (induction as
{primitive + grounded prior} with the loop closing on it, reboot-proven on a
snapshot). Build rails stated: offline/secondary, snapshot-first, reboot-prove,
zero-loss, gated launchctl cutover. Design only; no code changed this pass.
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.
bigmerge
will.anderson