A spoken Capture says what it said

[wschenk]

Summary

Why today's digest was worthless. Audio has been transcribed since ADR 0015, but the transcript lived only on the Enrichment row. Every surface that shows "the walker's own words" reads the Capture — and a Capture that was recorded rather than typed has empty text. So a spoken walk was blank to the day digest, search, the To-do list, the Day flow card, and the notebook alike. The digest was handed a corpus of empty lines and produced accordingly.

This was never a model problem. The model got nothing.

The fix

• sync_captures.transcript, carried by both repositories and written through a new recordCaptureTranscripts seam as the enrichment transcribes. Best-effort: a failure there costs the other surfaces their words, never the walker's report.
• Hydration adopts it onto Captures the device already holds, not just newly-imported ones. The Capture always syncs before it is transcribed, so without this the device that recorded the walk is precisely the one that never sees the words.
• captureWords() is the single reader — typed text wins, the transcript speaks when there is none, and a transcript never overwrites typing. Applied at all six read sites, so a recording and a typed note are the same thing everywhere downstream.

Rescuing walks that already happened

scripts/backfill-capture-transcripts.mjs copies transcripts already recorded on past Enrichments onto their Captures. Deliberately a copy, not a re-enrichment: re-running the gateway would re-spend it and rewrite reports the walker may have already filed and routed.

fnox exec --profile prod -- node scripts/backfill-capture-transcripts.mjs --day 2026-08-08 --dry-run
fnox exec --profile prod -- node scripts/backfill-capture-transcripts.mjs --day 2026-08-08

--day rescues one walk; omit it for the whole archive. It refuses to run against a database that hasn't taken the migration yet, and keeps an existing transcript unless --force.

Test plan

• tests/capture-transcript.spec.ts — 6 tests covering the seam end to end, including the exact failure: a day of recordings reaching the digest prompt as words rather than blanks. Also: typed text always wins, re-transcription is idempotent, an empty transcript never erases a good one, and hydration gives the words to a Capture the device already holds.
• Neighbouring suites green (26 passed): todo-destination, journal-notebook, day-digest, sync-hydrate, globals-css
• pnpm exec tsc --noEmit clean; eslint adds no new errors (the pre-existing set-state-in-effect ones are untouched)

No-ticket: true

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01Mm4zPLAX77USAqyk12jgc1

---

Generated by Claude Code

[vercel]

The latest updates on your projects. Learn more about Vercel for GitHub.

Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
walking-thoughts	Ready	Preview	Aug 8, 2026 2:00pm