Heuristics

Heuristics: Source-to-Memory Ingestion

Goal

Turn user-provided files or folders into useful historian memories.

This skill is a lightweight workflow. It does not add a new TypeScript tool, knowledge-graph subsystem, or persistent ingestion pipeline. Use the current agent's file and MCP abilities to extract source content, then use @historian memory tools to save only durable knowledge.

Required Inputs

The user must provide at least one file or folder path.

If no path is provided, ask for the path before doing anything else.

Optional user inputs:

• file globs or extensions to include or exclude
• preferred memory type, if known
• whether to process all files or only selected files
• whether to skip large or low-signal files

Required First Step

Before extracting or saving content, ask @historian to list available memory types:

@historian list all memory types available

Use the returned type names as the primary memoryType values for saved memories. If no type is a good fit for a file, skip that file and report why.

Extraction Routing

For each user-provided path, enumerate candidate files first. Skip generated, dependency, cache, and binary build-output folders unless the user explicitly included them.

Common folders to skip by default:

• .git/
• node_modules/
• dist/, build/, .next/, coverage/
• cache folders such as .cache/, .turbo/, .parcel-cache/

Text and Code Files

Read directly when the file is text-like:

• Markdown, TXT, RST, YAML, TOML, JSON, XML, CSV, TSV
• source code and config files
• logs when the user explicitly asks to ingest them

Extract durable facts, decisions, conventions, issues, preferences, or reusable patterns. Do not store raw full files unless the whole file is already a concise source of truth.

Document Files

For PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, HTML, EPUB, and similar document formats:

1. If markitdown is available, use it to convert the file to Markdown.
2. If markitdown is unavailable or fails, extract with the best available LLM or file-reading method.
3. If extraction remains unreliable, skip the file and report the failure.

markitdown is optional. Never require the user to install it before making progress if an LLM extraction path is available.

Images and Screenshots

For PNG, JPG, JPEG, WEBP, GIF, HEIC, SVG, and screenshot-like files:

1. Use a vision MCP when available.
2. Prefer OCR-oriented extraction for screenshots containing text.
3. Prefer general image analysis for diagrams, whiteboards, or visual notes.
4. If no vision MCP is available, use LLM extraction if possible; otherwise skip and report that image extraction was unavailable.

Mixed Folders

For folders, group files by extraction route and process the highest-signal files first. The agent may decide chunking and batch size based on the folder size, file sizes, and context budget. There is no fixed cap.

Classification Rules

Classify each extracted item against the available memory types from memory_list_types.

Use these heuristics unless the project defines better custom types:

If several files describe the same concept, merge them into one memory rather than creating duplicates.

Persistence Workflow

For each useful extracted item:

1. Search existing memories with memory_recall when the content may duplicate or update existing knowledge.
2. If a related memory exists, update it via memory_remember using its filePath.
3. If no related memory exists, create a new memory with memory_remember.
4. Use concise, descriptive titles. Do not include the memory type in the title.
5. Add source paths in the memory body so the saved knowledge remains traceable.

Example historian request:

@historian remember this as a learning:
Title: markitdown-is-optional-for-source-ingestion
Content: Source ingestion should use markitdown when available, but fall back to
LLM extraction when it is not installed. Source: docs/ingestion-notes.md

What Not To Store

Skip content that is not durable project memory:

• temporary logs without a decision or finding
• copied vendor docs that can be retrieved elsewhere
• generated build artifacts
• raw source files with no extracted lesson, decision, convention, or issue
• secrets, credentials, tokens, or private personal data

If a file contains secrets, do not save the secret. Save only a sanitized issue memory when useful, such as "example env file contained a real-looking token".

Final Report

After processing, report a compact table:

Also report:

• memory types discovered
• files skipped and why
• any extraction failures

Example Prompts

Use heuristics to ingest ./docs into historian memories.

Use heuristics on ./research and only save architectural decisions and issues.

Use heuristics to extract these screenshots into memory: ./notes/*.png

Use heuristics to ingest ./meeting-notes, use markitdown if available, otherwise
extract with LLM judgement.

Success Criteria

The workflow is complete only when:

1. The user-provided paths were enumerated.
2. Available memory types were checked through @historian first.
3. Each file was extracted, skipped, or failed with a clear reason.
4. Useful knowledge was classified into an available memory type.
5. Useful knowledge was saved through memory_remember via @historian.
6. The final report maps every processed source to its extraction method, memory type, and result.