Archived
will.anderson
c3bba5676b
A persona seed is generative: values and biography are prose, the installer
mints an id for each node, and the ids are incidental because nothing
outside the graph refers to them. A genesis seed is declarative -- it ships
identity_nodes[] with explicit ids and edges[] written in terms of them,
and the ids are the artifact. is_protected_node keys on exact ids and every
declared edge references them.
install.el only understood the persona schema. It never read identity_nodes
or edges, so installing Neuron's genesis seed minted 102 unrelated nodes
and produced a graph structurally unrelated to the one the seed describes.
The result in the live graph: 87 of 102 declared nodes absent, 2 present
with only their label as content, 202 of 214 edges never laid.
Branch on seed_type. Seeds without one reach the identical persona code
they always did. Genesis seeds render their declared nodes and edges into a
snapshot-format file and hand it to the engram, which honors the ids --
POST /api/nodes/reseed where available, POST /api/load-merge otherwise.
Both skip nodes already present and dedup edges, so a rerun is a no-op by
construction.
Three things this path does differently, all inherent to what a genesis
seed is:
- It never provisions. A persona seed gets a port and a launchd Engram; a
genesis seed installs into an engram that already exists and is owned by
something else. The ":8742 refusal" is also inverted -- that guard stops
a foreign soul landing in Neuron's engram, and Neuron's own identity
graph is the one thing that belongs there. GENESIS_CONFIRM takes its
place, because rewriting the graph a running CGI reads itself out of
should never happen because someone typed a familiar command with an
unfamiliar file.
- It splices raw JSON tokens rather than decoding and re-escaping. The seed
bodies are multi-KB markdown with newlines, quotes and \u escapes; a
round-trip through str_escape_json would have to reproduce every escape
the author wrote, and any it does not know about silently corrupts the
body. Copying a token verbatim cannot corrupt what it never decodes.
- It verifies by re-reading. The bug this replaces reported success while
delivering empty bodies, so success is not what the write returned, it is
what the graph now holds: every declared id is re-read and audited
against the hollow signature, and the manifest reports created / filled /
skipped / failed with the failing ids named.
Hollow detection is deliberately conservative -- under 40% of the declared
body and under 400 bytes -- so a node whose body legitimately grew in the
graph is left alone. Genesis restores what is missing; it does not
overwrite what the graph has learned.
Also registers Neuron in registry.json (installed:false until the identity
load is authorized) and defines HAVE_CURL in CFLAGS, without which the
el-compiler runtime links fine and then answers every HTTP call with
{"error":"not built with HAVE_CURL"}.
Verified against a sandbox engram seeded to mirror the live graph's state
for this seed: created 87, filled 2, skipped 13, failed 0; 102/102 nodes
verified byte-exact against the seed where the seed is authoritative;
214/214 edges laid; 682/682 non-seed incident edges preserved through the
two in-place replaces; rerun reports 102 skipped, 0 nodes and 0 edges
added. Against an engram without the reseed route it creates the 87, fills
none, and fails loudly naming the 2 it could not repair.