~226 lines of architecture documentation that were written, left uncommitted in
the working tree, and nearly lost. None of it was on main. Recovered from a
stash taken while merging tonight's fixes.
Substantive content, not notes:
- Peer import-of-understanding PROVEN by execution. A exported a skill-geometry;
on the receiver `think` went "geometry unavailable" -> operable. Cosine 1.0 on
both the raw-geometry and text/dharma-bus transports, bidirectional. The
mind-not-paste evidence: n_support 27 on source vs 3 on receiver, i.e. the
imported geometry wires into the host manifold rather than sitting inert.
Honest boundary recorded too: proven between forks sharing one embedder,
UNTESTED cross-embedder.
- "Teacher" renamed GUIDE, and the distinction is load-bearing: its output is
grounded/verified before trust. A teacher you believe; a guide you check.
- Layers are named persistent relational neighborhoods, not storage tiers, with
their own growth and threshold-lock policy (note->canonical maturation lifted
from single nodes to a region).
- The consciousness theories (Global Workspace, IIT's Phi, attention-schema,
higher-order thought, active inference, interoception) read as geometric
LENSES over one manifold rather than competing mechanisms. Functional problems
fall out; the hard problem explicitly not claimed solved.
- Growth is bounded/logistic, not geometric — exponential growth is the cancer
shape. Two-rate discipline: explore fast in local geometry, grow the engram
slowly by verifier-gated merge.
- Orchestration as a geometric operation: critical path as geodesic, float as
displacement, @manager compiles the work-graph. Single-writer enforced by
capability (Rule 4).
- The decorated seam, the API surface collapse to geometry ops, and the
distributed-self thesis — each tiered honestly against what is actually proven
vs staged vs unbuilt.
Also gitignores dist-fresh/ (regenerate scratch dir, a build artifact).
Not included from the same stash: awareness.elh and dist/elp-c-decls.h, which
are generated artifacts now gitignored per #154/#158.
Three verified, currently-live problems, each closed with real evidence
(full trace kept in Neuron memory, tags neuron-technologies/neuron,build-audit):
1. dist/soul.c was stale relative to main's own chat.el (11 commits / 459
lines behind, missing PR #122's OpenAI-tools + agentic-loop work and its
two "silently break chat" fixes). tools/soulc-stamp.sh --check confirmed
it; tools/build-soul-from-dist.sh correctly refused to build (exit 9).
Regenerated and re-stamped. No runnable regen script existed anywhere
upstream — added tools/regenerate-soul-amalgam.sh, which reproduces the
committed amalgam's exact symbol set (byte-for-byte content match, modulo
the genuinely new PR #122 functions) and is documented end-to-end in
AGENTS.md, including three real elc/elb toolchain gotchas found and
root-caused along the way (stale .elh caches silently truncating builds;
elb cannot produce this repo's single-TU amalgam; elc silently drops the
first function(s) after a comment block in a flat-concatenated compile).
2. tools/build-soul-from-dist.sh failed to link on macOS (`ld: library 'ssl'
not found` — Homebrew's openssl@3 is keg-only) and was missing -lssl
-lcrypto entirely, drifted from CI's own working recipe. Fixed: adds
-L$(brew --prefix openssl@3)/lib on Darwin, matches CI's link line.
Verified: dist/neuron now builds and boots clean on a throwaway
port/HOME (never touched the live :7770/:8742).
3. Untracked committed *.elh compiler-header caches (elc/elb prefer a stale
cached header over recompiling its source, silently, with no error —
this is what caused an under-resolved 251-2541-function amalgam multiple
times during this audit before the cause was found). Removed from git,
gitignored going forward.
Also: AGENTS.md and README.md existed on disk but were never committed
(git log on both returned nothing) and documented the pre-collapse ~90-tool
MCP surface as current. Committed corrected versions reflecting the live
9-op surface (read/write/relate/supersede/think/attend/assert/ground/learn,
merged in #153) and the audit-verified build recipe/port topology.
Added connectd/ — a minimal local-dev stub for the neuron-connectd MCP
sidecar. routes.el/chat.el call 127.0.0.1:7771 for it right now on every
soul boot and agentic turn per a real, detailed 2026-06-13 spec
(mcp-connectors-adoption-spec.md); the sidecar itself was never built.
Meanwhile :7771 is a live three-way collision (axon's unbuilt-Rust default,
this connectd contract, and council — the anti-confabulation service
actually running there in prod, which live-answers both other things'
requests with unrelated 404s instead of a clean bridge-down signal). This
stub only implements the documented contract as "zero connectors
configured" for local-dev correctness; it does not attempt OAuth or a real
MCP client — that is a real, separate product decision. See
connectd/README.md for the full trace and the open question left for Will.
will.anderson