The Enrichment contract narrows to what it actually answers (ADR 0019)

[wschenk]

"It feels like it's too complicated."

Measured across the whole corpus with scripts/what-it-knows.mjs: every report is asked for eleven fields, and four of them come back empty or useless.

Field	Over 171 reports
topics	438 distinct slugs, 405 naming exactly one Thread (92%)
mentions	emitted by 14 reports; 37 of 38 nouns occur once
suggestedQuestions	165 of 171 returned zero
draftWorthy	never once true

Against the four that work: every report titles itself, 82% classify, proposals accrue Threads, and 136 of 171 did real research.

All four are cut — from the prompt, the parser, the gateway contract, both repositories' writes, and the surfaces that displayed them. TITLE / KIND / ASK / PROJECT / PROPOSE stay.

The point is not that the ideas were bad. A walker carries the whole vocabulary in their head whether or not the machine fills it in, and four empty columns read as a system that is organizing when it is not.

What goes with them

• The Mentions rail group (7 facet groups → 6)
• The Topics Lens — which was a Project stack with a mention fallback, so it keeps the half that works and is renamed project for what it actually does
• The draft-candidate queue and its notebook flag
• The suggested-question chips on the Thread page
• ~1,100 lines net, and their CSS

Retrieval

retrievePriorThreads keeps its embedding half and loses the exact-noun half. The same measurement says that path cannot have been firing: 14 reports carrying any mention against 150 of 155 Threads carrying an embedding. The vector path was doing all the work. Signature, best-effort posture, and cold-start behaviour are unchanged.

Columns are left in place holding their history rather than dropped — a reversal should find them where it left them.

Three unrelated reds, found and fixed on the way

All three were already failing on main:

• The Day flow took the page 109px sideways. A Thread titled after a 95-character filename set the min-content of a minmax(13rem, 1fr) grid track, and the lanes pushed past the viewport. min-width: 0 on the lane, overflow-wrap: anywhere on its items.
• A test that failed by the calendar. The trash-restore case pinned no clock, so its July 2026 dates passed the 30-day retention deadline on July 31 and it had been red every day since.
• The sql-tables guard read information_schema.columns as a missing user table — tripped by the transcript backfill in The transcript backfill runs its own migration #174. It now recognizes a schema-qualified catalog read.

And lib/sync/hydrate.ts is a text file again. The two NUL bytes that made git classify it as binary — and merge it wholesale with no conflict markers, a silent data-loss hazard flagged two PRs ago — lived inside the topics comparison this removes.

Tests

pixel-9 362 passed · desktop 26 passed · typecheck clean · lint at its pre-existing baseline (7 errors, all on main).

Two spec files deleted (enrichment-mentions, desk-mentions-desktop) and the mention-link cases in desk-similarity / desk-priors-desktop / enrichment-retrieval rewritten for the embedding path.

One pre-existing flake left alone and reported rather than papered over: thread-dialogue.spec.ts:11 fails about 1 run in 3, at the same rate on main.

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Generated by Claude Code

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
walking-thoughts	Ready	Preview	Aug 9, 2026 4:13pm