Vault consolidate

vault-consolidate

Cluster related episodic memories and synthesise them into durable semantic notes.

Mindset

Think of --propose as generating a diff and --apply as committing the merge. You never commit without reviewing the diff first. The human is always the final gatekeeper — the agent's job is to surface candidates, not to decide what gets promoted to long-term memory.

When to use

• After a long session with many captures
• When the user asks to "consolidate", "summarise", or "clean up" memories
• Periodic maintenance (e.g. end of week)

Workflow

Always propose before applying:

# Step 1 — generate proposals (written to vault inbox for review)
vault-cli consolidate --propose [--project <id>]

# Step 2 — open vault inbox, review, set status: approved or rejected
# (edit 00-inbox/consolidation-proposals.md in Obsidian)

# Step 3 — apply approved proposals
vault-cli consolidate --apply

If --propose outputs "No episodic memories found to consolidate", skip Step 3 — there is nothing to apply.

What happens

• --propose: clusters episodic memories by semantic similarity, calls the inference command to synthesise each cluster, writes proposals to 00-inbox/consolidation-proposals.md
• --apply: reads the proposals file, writes approved ones as semantic notes, marks source episodics as superseded, logs rejected ones to audit

Important

Source episodic memories are never deleted — only marked superseded. Human edits in Obsidian are always respected and never overwritten.

Never

• Never run --apply without first running --propose — doing so bypasses human review and irreversibly promotes unreviewed clusters to semantic memory
• Never run --apply without confirming the user has reviewed the proposals — always pause at Step 2 and wait for the user to confirm before proceeding
• Never delete episodic source memories manually — they are preserved automatically and serve as audit history