The soul obeys half of its own ownership rule. soul.el:571-573 says "when
ENGRAM_URL is set the HTTP Engram owns persistence — the soul must NEVER write
to the local snapshot", and it doesn't. But nothing was ever built to hand the
soul's writes TO that owner: sync is pull-only (/api/sync -> engram_load_merge),
so every node created inside the soul lived in process RAM and was shed on
restart. Measured live 2026-08-07: soul node_count=102184, engram 79197.
SCOPE CORRECTION vs the earlier internal spec: engram provisional claim 17's
"pull-then-push" is a PEER-ENGRAM to PEER-ENGRAM protocol (claims 15-18 say so
explicitly). The soul is a CALLER of the database API, not a peer. Claim 17 is
NOT authority for a soul<->engram contract and is no longer cited as such. The
design here follows from the ownership rule alone.
Mechanism: a new Accessor, persist.el, is the single boundary. Writes stage a
delta to a filesystem spool and are pushed to the owner via POST /api/load-merge
— NOT POST /api/nodes, which mints a new server-side id (breaking dedup and
edges) and drops label/tier/tags/importance/confidence (verified in a sandbox:
a tier "Canonical" probe came back "Working"). load-merge preserves the id and
every field, dedups nodes by id and edges by (from,to,relation) so retries are
no-ops, and calls persist_canonical() so THE OWNER writes its own file — the
ownership rule is honoured rather than worked around.
Spool-and-drain rather than push-per-write: measured ~0.38s per load-merge at
live scale (79k nodes/176MB), and a chat turn writes 5-7 nodes. The spool is on
disk, not in process state, because the soul serves each connection on its own
pthread and a shared buffer would lose entries to a read-modify-write race. That
also buys crash recovery: writes orphaned by kill -9 are drained on next boot.
Honesty: api_persisted (the gate all 10 MCP write handlers pass through) and
mem_store now assert AT THE OWNER instead of reading back the soul's own RAM.
With the owner down a write returns {"ok":false,"error":"write_not_persisted"}
and the delta is queued — where main returns {"ok":true} for a write that dies.
Coverage: 35 node sites + 9 edge sites routed through the boundary. Deliberately
excluded, with reasons in persist.el: 4 InternalStateEvent sites (Will's own
telemetry carve-out), the boot counter and the persona (both already have
bespoke owner-side write-backs), and soul.el's 54 genesis identity edges
(file-mode only). engram_strengthen and engram_forget are NOT propagated —
load-merge cannot update or delete, and hard-deleting at the owner would fail
verify-soul-contract.sh section B.
Also fixed here:
- routes.el GET /api/graph/edges engram_save()'d straight over the owner's
canonical snapshot.json — a read route, in a non-owner process, clobbering the
canonical on every call. Same defect class Will removed from the engram in el
dc39a61. Now exports to a scratch path. With this gone the soul writes nothing
at all in HTTP mode.
- persist.el must clear the runtime's _tl_fs_read_len hint after every fs_read.
In vendored runtime v1.0.0-20260501 that hint becomes the NEXT response's
Content-Length, so reading a spool file mid-request made an 86-byte reply go
out as 497 bytes with 411 bytes of adjacent heap trailing it. Caught and fixed
at our boundary; the runtime class was fixed upstream in el 43636ae, which is
not the pinned runtime here.
Rung: E2E-VERIFIED, discriminating. Same harness, same engram binary:
write-through: LEG 1 PRESENT at owner, LEG 2 SURVIVED kill -9 + restart
main: LEG 1 ABSENT at owner, LEG 2 LOST
verify-soul-contract.sh: GATE PASS on both builds (27/27 routes, immutability).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three stale soul:boot_count copies (salience .9, importance .9, Canonical:
+0.2 tier bias, 0.15 threshold) held the top WM slots for 23h — a boot
counter outcompeting real context. Demoted to salience .55 / importance .2 /
tier Working: plumbing, not memory.
Persistence was also broken: in HTTP-engram mode the server owns state and
nothing wrote the counter back — the log shows boot #5 on three consecutive
boots. mem_boot_count_inc now mirrors the persona write-back: delete stale
server copies (matched by content prefix — route_create_node sets
label=content), create the replacement server-side. Working tier is in the
boot seed (/api/nodes) but excluded from periodic /api/sync, so the count
survives restarts without re-importing mid-session. Verified: restart
incremented 1->2 with exactly one server-side counter node.
A fresh-install (SOUL_CGI_ID=ntn-genesis) boot crashed with
"Segmentation fault: 11" right after the http server came up — a real
customer's very first boot. Backtrace:
strcmp(0x1) <- str_eq (el_runtime.c:219) <- mem_save <- awareness_run
Root cause: the el runtime's engram_save returns an Int (1 = ok, 0 =
failure), but mem_save did `str_eq(engram_save(path), "")`, treating the
return as a String. str_eq runs EL_CSTR on it, which is a raw cast:
EL_CSTR(1) = (char*)0x1. On a SUCCESSFUL save (return 1) strcmp then
dereferences 0x1 and segfaults. Genesis is the first path that both seeds
the brain AND saves it successfully on the very first awareness pass, so it
crashes there; non-genesis boots (contract gate, refusal test) don't hit a
successful early mem_save, which is why they passed. handle_api_consolidate
had the identical latent bug.
Fix: read engram_save's Int result and compare `== 0` instead of str_eq'ing
it — in mem_save (memory.el) and handle_api_consolidate (neuron-api.el).
Regression: pre-existing, NOT introduced by the immutability/floor rebuild.
The pre-immutability build (1442ce2) genesis-crashes identically in the same
unchanged mem_save; #159 never actually fixed#150 for a release-runtime
build.
Regenerated dist/soul.c + per-module dist/{memory,neuron-api}.c (3GB RSS
watchdog, built against release el_runtime v1.0.0-20260501). Verified:
genesis boot survives (/health 200, no segfault), verify-soul-contract.sh
GATE PASS (PRESENCE + IMMUTABILITY), and the bounded-persona floor is still
compiled in (BOUNDED PERSONA / SOUL_PERSONA_NAME strings present).
The ship-soul builds from this branch, which has the bounded-persona floor
(#93) but never received the tombstone/supersede immutability fix (that
went to main; hotfix diverged before it). So the launch soul failed
verify-soul-contract IMMUTABILITY on the delete/update/forget routes —
they hard-removed engram nodes via engram_forget/mem_forget.
Apply the same fix, mirroring the knowledge routes' supersede pattern:
- node/update -> create new node + "supersedes" edge to the original, KEEP
the original (no engram_forget).
- node/delete, memory/delete, memory/forget, cultivate forget, and the
autonomous awareness forget -> TOMBSTONE via the canonical mem_tombstone
(memory.el): keep the node + its edges, record a Tombstone marker, hide
from default bounded list reads (?include_deleted recovers). Never
engram_forget. The MCP forget tool now routes to the tombstoning delete
instead of faking a delete.
Internal GC that genuinely removes transient nodes (awareness inbox-trigger
consume, consolidation dedup, session-summary replace, telemetry pruning)
still calls engram_forget directly and is unchanged.
Regenerated dist/soul.c (single-TU) + per-module dist/{memory,awareness,
neuron-api}.c from THIS branch's sources under a 3GB physical-RSS watchdog
(peak ~32MB), built against the release el_runtime (v1.0.0-20260501). The
bounded-persona floor is preserved — verified in the emitted C and the
linked binary (BOUNDED PERSONA / SOUL_PERSONA_NAME strings present).
verify-soul-contract.sh: GATE PASS — PRESENCE all 27 routes, IMMUTABILITY
5/5 KEPT (memory-update, memory-delete, node-update, node-delete,
memory-forget).
Fix 1: mem_boot_count_inc prunes all existing soul:boot_count nodes before
inserting the new one — keeps exactly one boot counter node instead
of accumulating a new node per boot. Also fixes a latent ordering
bug where engram_search_json oldest-first results caused the counter
to read stale (low) values once >3 copies accumulated.
Fix 3: handle_api_node_delete comment clarified — the no-verify exception
is correct for deletes (not a write path); read-back-verify is for
writes only.
Fix 4: emit_session_start_event prunes old session-start InternalStateEvent
nodes after each boot, keeping the 10 most recent and forgetting
older ones. Prevents unbounded accumulation of ~120+ copies.
Fix critical float parsing bug in engram_score_node: str_replace('.','')
then str_to_int silently miscored single-decimal salience strings (0.9->9,
0.7->7, 1.0->1). Introduce parse_salience_100() which detects decimal
position and scales correctly (no decimal: *100; one decimal: *10;
two decimals: as-is).
Replace flat 30-day linear decay with tier-aware decay curves: Canonical
nodes use a 365-day window (foundational identity resists aging), Episodic
nodes use 90 days, Working/untiered keep the existing 30-day slope. Floor
stays at 10 for all tiers.
Use max(created_at, updated_at) as the recency reference so revised nodes
are not penalised for their original creation date.
Extend affective context windows from 72h/7d to 14 days across all three
paths (engram_compile, handle_chat, soul.el load_identity_context) so a
Friday crisis carries into Monday sessions and all paths present consistent
context. The 72h/7d split caused conflicting affective context between
soul.el (which loaded a 5-day-old crisis node) and chat.el (which excluded
it on subsequent turns).
Add salience evolution to mem_consolidate: strengthen top working-memory
nodes (recently recalled across sessions) and Canonical-tier nodes
(foundational identity must not decay to the floor). Previously consolidate
returned structural counts only with no salience changes.
Expand conversation window from 20 to 40 turns in both handle_chat and the
agentic history trim. Long technical sessions were losing early problem
framing at 10 user + 10 assistant pairs.
Every engram_node_full call that dropped its return value now binds it
and emits a println on empty string. engram_save calls in consolidate,
heartbeat, and dharma-room-turn are checked for failure. The two API
handlers (log_state_event, tune_config) that skipped api_persisted()
now match the read-back-after-write contract used everywhere else in
neuron-api.el.
Files changed:
- chat.el: conv_history_persist, handle_dharma_room_turn, auto_persist
- soul.el: emit_session_start_event, seed_persona_from_env HTTP check
- memory.el: mem_save, mem_boot_count_inc
- neuron-api.el: handle_api_log_state_event, handle_api_tune_config,
handle_api_consolidate (engram_save + session summary write)
- awareness.el: ise_post local-engram fallback path
TODO comments added for non-atomic patterns (issues #12, #13) and
the missing circuit breaker (#14) — these require new primitives.
Routes a new event_type "chat_as_soul" through dharma/recv. The Studio
preassembles the system_prompt + transcript and dispatches per-speaker;
the soul-binary just performs the LLM call as the requested speaker_slug.
No engram_compile here — each soul has its own engram (88xx) and the
Studio queries it before composing the prompt.
Also: track the previously-untracked split source modules (chat, routes,
memory, awareness, studio) and add build.sh so the binary can be rebuilt
without the studio’s concat trick. elb resolves the import graph and
emits one .c per .el; we link them together with cc. dist/soul-el now
points at dist/neuron via symlink (matching the launchctl plist).
Tim Lingo
will.anderson