Dossier: Record

Record a person fact

Files live in ~/.claude/library/profiles/dossier/{slug}.md, one per person, gitignored. library/profiles/dossier/README.md holds the schema and is the authority on file shape.

This skill fires in the middle of other work. It must be quiet: one line of output, no summary, no restating what Jason just said back to him.

Step 1: Should this fire at all

Fires on a durable attribute of a named person Jason works with:

• Role, seniority, ownership: "Izaak leads fac-cra"
• Expertise and its limits: "Jaz is light on YAML but picks things up fast"
• Preferences and standards: "Dan wants PRs smaller"
• What they care about, what they reject, how they review
• How to work with them: pitch, handover, register, what to leave out
• Relationships: "Jaz, Max and I work together"
• Pronouns, when stated

Stays silent on:

• Routing and tasking: "send it to Dan", "ask Jess for the spreadsheet"
• One-off state: "Dan's on leave next week", "Jaz is reviewing it today"
• Passing mentions with no claim attached
• Anything about a person Jason does not work with, unless he asks for it
• Third-party gossip. A claim about someone's character, relayed from someone else, is not a working fact.

When it does not fire, do nothing and say nothing. A skill that announces its own restraint is worse than one that never ran.

Step 1a: Parse an explicit /dossier-record invocation

This step only applies when the skill was invoked explicitly as /dossier-record ... — it does not apply to the inline auto-fire path above, where the fact already sitting in conversation is the argument and Step 1's gate is the only gate that runs. An arg-count check on the inline path would make the skill demand arguments instead of quietly recording what was just said, which defeats the point of it firing inline at all.

For an explicit invocation, split $ARGUMENTS on whitespace and read the first token:

• First token is "new": the new-person variant. /dossier-record "new" <name> <fact 1> [fact 2] [fact 3] ... — token 2 is the person's name, every token after it is a separate fact to record for a person who should not already exist. If <name> resolves to an existing file (exact match or near miss per Step 2), stop and say so rather than silently treating this as a normal record — "new" is a claim that nobody has recorded this person yet, and that claim is worth surfacing when it is wrong. Fewer than two tokens after "new" (no name, or a name with no fact): request the name and at least one fact, tersely, and stop.
• Fewer than two tokens overall (no name, or a name with nothing to record): request both, tersely, and stop:

  Usage: /dossier-record <name> <fact> [fact 2] [fact 3] ...
         /dossier-record "new" <name> <fact> [fact 2] ...
  

• Two or more tokens, first token well-formed as a name and second well-formed as a fact: token 1 is the person (resolved per Step 2), token 2 is the first fact. Any further tokens (3+) are additional, separate facts about the same person, not more of the second fact — each becomes its own bullet under Step 3, not one bullet with everything folded in. "Well-formed" here just means non-empty and not itself another recognised keyword; this skill does not reject a name or fact for looking unusual, it only checks that both slots have something in them before treating the rest as extra facts.

Step 2: Resolve the person

ls ~/.claude/library/profiles/dossier/

• Exact slug match: open that file.
• Near miss (izak against izaak, a nickname, a surname): ask which person is meant before writing. Two files for one person is the failure mode that makes the whole directory untrustworthy.
• No match: new person, so create the file from the README's schema with what is known and an ## Open questions section listing what is not. A file with one fact and three open questions is doing its job; it gives the next fact somewhere to land. Leave id unset; linkedProfileIds starts []. Then run python3 "$HOME"/.claude/library/scripts/assign_profile_ids.py so the new file gets its id immediately — waiting until a persona derivation needs it (see Step 2a) would leave a freshly created file id-less in the meantime.

Step 2a: Record a persona link (only when asked to)

Fires when a red-* skill's persona derivation (Step 1c in library/references/red/methodology.md) has invented a name for a persona derived from this entry and needs the link recorded on the dossier side. Not part of the normal fact-recording flow; this skill is invoked for that purpose specifically.

1. Append ["{persona's id}", true, "{today}", "{linkDescription}"] to this person's linkedProfileIds — isSource: true, since this entry is the origin, and the id (not the persona's invented name) is what makes the link. linkDescription can be as specific as this file already is; it never leaves the machine.
2. Update updated too, since the file changed.
3. Report the persona's id back to whatever asked for it. Nothing else changes; this step never touches ## Facts or any other section, and never writes the persona's own fields (needs, stake, and so on) here.

Written once per persona derivation, updated again only on a refresh (the existing link is reused, never duplicated).

Step 3: Write the fact

Append one bullet to ## Facts, in Jason's words where he gave them, with today's date in backticks at the end of the line. When Step 1a handed over more than one fact, repeat this step once per fact, in order — each is its own bullet, checked against Step 4's contradiction gate independently, so one contradicting fact among several does not block the rest from being written.

• Mark inference. A fact Jason stated stands bare. Anything worked out from context takes *(inferred)*. This matters most when the file is later used to predict how someone behaves.
• One fact per bullet. A sentence carrying three claims becomes three bullets, each separately correctable.
• Absolute dates. "Last week" becomes the date.
• Pronouns are only ever recorded when stated. unstated stays in the frontmatter until Jason says otherwise, and everything written about that person uses they/them in the meantime.
• Update updated.

Facts about how to work with someone go under ## Working with them instead. An answered open question is deleted from ## Open questions when its answer is added to ## Facts.

Step 4: The contradiction gate

If the new fact contradicts a line already in the file, write neither. Raise it in one line, quote both versions, ask which holds. The correction is usually the more interesting fact, and silently overwriting loses the fact that something changed.

Additive facts need no permission. This gate exists for conflicts alone.

Step 5: Index it

A new person gets a one-line pointer in the People section of ~/.claude/projects/-Users-jasonwarren--claude/memory/MEMORY.md:

- **Name**: one-line hook, [dossier](../../../../library/profiles/dossier/{slug}.md)

Existing people need no index change unless the one-line hook is now wrong.

Step 6: Report

One line. Recorded: Jaz is light on advanced skill builds → library/profiles/dossier/jaz.md. Then carry on with whatever the turn was actually about.

Rules

• Local only. These files are gitignored on purpose. Never copy dossier content into a tracked file, a commit message, a PR description, an artefact or anything published. A guide written for a person is calibrated against their file; it never names them or quotes it.
• Working notes. Record what changes how work gets done. Personal detail Jason volunteers in passing stays out of the file.
• Jason can always see it. Anything in these files should be something he would be comfortable reading aloud to the person it describes.