Consolidate workspace

consolidate-workspace

Inspect this workspace's record of work, lift durable truth out of it into maintained context, then prune what's now redundant. Durable knowledge routes into the vault workspace; follow-ups route into Mimir.

Primary agent only. Workspace-scoped — it consolidates only the bound workspace (the workspace from .atlas.toml / the Session Primer). The cross-workspace user.md / memory.md regeneration is consolidate-memory, a separate skill.

What consolidation is (and isn't)

Consolidation is a different job from write-session-log. write-session-log keeps the rolling narrative (the Brief's Current State / Learnings) fresh; consolidation lifts durable truth out of the frozen logs into standing homes, and prunes the rolling narrative back down.

• A fresh-looking Brief is NOT evidence that consolidation has run. Litmus: if a fact only lives in a dated Current-State paragraph or a per-session Learnings bullet, it is not consolidated yet — that's narrative, not maintained context. Don't mistake a maintained Current State for a finished job.
• The frozen Session Log IS the durable record of what happened. Maintained context carries only the lifted residue: a sharpened term → glossary, a hard-to-reverse decision → ADR, a durable principle → a notes/ file, an open thread → the Brief/board. Don't duplicate the log into the Brief. The same content living in the log and a Current-State paragraph and a Learnings bullet is the bloat signature — triplication is the smell.

Preflight — norn is required

This skill drives norn to find and mark Session Logs; there is no fallback. Check it's available before doing anything:

command -v norn || { echo "consolidate-workspace requires the 'norn' CLI on PATH. Install it and re-run."; exit 1; }
[ -n "$ATLAS_PATH" ] && [ -f "$ATLAS_PATH/.norn/config.yaml" ] || { echo "consolidate-workspace needs ATLAS_PATH set to the atlas vault root (the dir containing .norn/config.yaml)."; exit 1; }

If norn is missing, stop and tell the user to install norn and put it on their PATH — do not fall back to manually scanning artifacts/session-logs/.

Pin the vault on every norn call: norn -C "$ATLAS_PATH" …. norn resolves its vault from $NORN_ROOT, else the current directory — never from ATLAS_PATH. This skill runs from a repo cwd, so a bare norn call operates on whatever .norn is nearest (or none), silently reading or writing the wrong place. Always pass -C "$ATLAS_PATH", including in every sub-agent you dispatch that touches norn.

1. Find this workspace's unconsolidated logs

There's no watermark file. Each Session Log carries a workspace_consolidated flag, so ask norn for the ones still open in this workspace:

norn -C "$ATLAS_PATH" find --eq type:session-log --eq workspace:<workspace> --eq workspace_consolidated:false

Each returned log's Consolidation Candidates section is a unit of work; process oldest-first. The companion flag memory_consolidated belongs to consolidate-memory — don't read or touch it here.

2. Route each candidate — but verify first

Per resources/consolidation-candidates.md. Before routing any candidate, verify it:

• Dedup — is it already captured (Brief, an ADR, the glossary, or the work tracker)? If so, don't re-add. Don't duplicate.
• Still applies? — carried tech-debt rots. Check the candidate against the live code/state before filing; a follow-up may already be fixed, moot, or subsumed by other planned work. File only what survives. (Verify, don't assume — this is the operator's standing expectation, not an optional courtesy.)
• Recurring? — a candidate carried across ≥2 runs is itself the signal to act: file it or force a decision now; don't let it be "carried" again.

Bucket	Routes to
Durable knowledge	Workspace Brief (below the rule) / a decisions/ ADR / a notes/ note
Future opportunities	a Mimir task (mimir CLI) if the repo tracks work there — never re-grow a task list the workspace has migrated out

• Promote durable knowledge into the right maintained file; don't duplicate what's already there.
• For a hard-to-reverse decision, write a real ADR. For a durable principle (a generative rule, not a decision), prefer a notes/ file over bloating the Brief.
• For a follow-up / tech-debt / open-question, file it where the workspace tracks work, after the dedup + still-applies checks above.
• User observations are not this skill's bucket. The collaboration-pattern candidates feed shared/user.md / shared/memory.md, which span all workspaces — that's consolidate-memory's job, keyed on the separate memory_consolidated flag. Leave them for it; don't rewrite the shared profile from one workspace's logs.
• A consolidated Session Log is spent — leave it frozen, but it's now prunable, not a permanent archive.

Mark the log consolidated

Once a log's durable-knowledge + future-opportunity candidates are routed (or confirmed already-captured by the dedup check), mark it so it drops out of the scan:

norn -C "$ATLAS_PATH" set <log path> --field-json workspace_consolidated=true --yes

This touches only workspace_consolidated — never memory_consolidated.

3. Groom the Brief (a consolidation output, not a side task)

Consolidation isn't done until the Brief is small again. Follow resources/workspace-hygiene.md; operationally:

• Prune the spent narrative. Once a log is consolidated, its narrative is redundant with the frozen log — remove it from the Brief. The below-the-rule rolling sections (Current State, Learnings / Recent Sessions) must not accumulate one entry per session.
• Current State = current position, not a changelog. It should read as orientation — current position, open explorations, stable working norms — not a session-by-session history. Collapse or drop entries older than the last meaningful boundary (e.g. the last release/milestone).
• Learnings. Per-session learning bullets duplicate the logs — drop them. Distilled, durable principles worth keeping go to a notes/ file with a one-line Brief pointer, not an ever-growing inline list.
• Open Questions. Drop resolved items (they're folded into ADRs/glossary as they close); keep only what's genuinely open.
• Zones. Groom the below-the-rule zone freely; touch the above-the-rule manifest (overview, tech stack, key paths, conventions, navigation) only for factual pointer updates, never to rewrite human-authored content.
• Sanity check: if the Brief reads like a log of what happened rather than the context a new session needs, it isn't groomed yet.

Stamp the groomed baseline

A freshly-groomed Brief is this workspace's size target — it already reflects the project's legitimate durable complexity, so no hand-tuned number is needed. Once grooming is done, measure the Brief and record the size in its frontmatter as brief_baseline, overwriting any prior value. Measure with the same code-point count the primer uses (not wc -m, whose count is bytes under a C/POSIX locale and would drift from the primer's len() on any multi-byte content):

brief="$ATLAS_PATH/Workspaces/<workspace>/<workspace>.md"
python3 -c 'import pathlib,sys; print(len(pathlib.Path(sys.argv[1]).read_text(encoding="utf-8")))' "$brief"

Stamp that number into the Brief's frontmatter with norn — schema-aware, atomic, and guaranteed to land inside the fenced block (which is the only place the primer trusts):

norn -C "$ATLAS_PATH" set "Workspaces/<workspace>/<workspace>.md" --field-json brief_baseline=<chars> --yes

(An unknown field: brief_baseline warning is expected and benign — the field is agent-maintained, not in the vault schema.) Don't otherwise rewrite the human-authored manifest. build_primer.py reads this baseline and, on each session start, soft-recommends re-running consolidation once the Brief grows past brief_baseline × 1.75 — a non-blocking banner atop the primer. This is the only place the baseline is refreshed, so keep it current with every groom; the small delta from adding the stamp line itself is absorbed by the 75% margin. A Brief with no brief_baseline reads as never-consolidated and the primer recommends an initial pass, which seeds it here.

4. Record the run

There's no state file to advance — the per-log workspace_consolidated flags are the record. Briefly report what was promoted and where, and what was dropped as stale/duplicate.

Notes

Two flags, two skills: workspace_consolidated (this skill) and memory_consolidated (consolidate-memory). Each scans and marks only its own flag via norn, so a log is independently consolidated for its workspace and for the shared profile — neither blocks the other.