Knowledge Stack

Knowledge Stack

Nick's durable knowledge lives in two kinds of place: per-repo trackers (code-adjacent) and three Basic Memory projects (everything else). Stored memory summaries are lossy snapshots of these; the artifacts below are the real truth. Consult them before reasoning.

The Layers

Per-repo dev work → the repo's own tracker, not Basic Memory.

• Architecture, implementation plans, active tasks, roadmap-of-code.
• Tracker depends on the repo: Cortex uses backlog.md (backlog doc list, backlog task list; see the backlog-md skill). The atlas-crew repos — Facet plus the security repos Apparatus, Chimera, Crucible, Synapse, Bridge — use GitHub Issues + Projects (gh issue, gh project; see the atlas-crew-tasks skill). Don't assume backlog.md everywhere — check the repo.

Atlas Crew product work → the products Basic Memory project (~/Obsidian/Product_Management).

• Product strategy, brand, positioning, pricing, GTM, planning, specs, PM docs — the product layer, not the code layer.
• Organized by Atlas Crew family: Security (Synapse, Chimera, Crucible, Bridge, Apparatus), Career Intel (Facet), Dev Tools (Cortex and utilities), Writing (Hard Stuff blog). The root Product Management Vault Home.md is the map.
• _Archive/ holds frozen history (old job-search material, captured sessions). Treat as read-only context, not current state.

The Unanet job → the work Basic Memory project (~/Obsidian/Work, under unanet/).

• Personal working-memory for Nick's Senior Platform Release Engineer role: journal/ (append-only daily firehose), systems/, glossary, open-questions, observations-about-me, etc. Its README defines the capture workflow.
• This project syncs to Nick's work laptop. The bar for what goes here is "fine if a coworker glanced over my shoulder." Candid people-notes, political tripwires, and customer/contract/proprietary specifics stay in segregated local-only files outside this vault — never write them into the synced work project. When in doubt, append to today's journal and route later; when sensitive, keep it out.

Everything else cross-cutting → the main Basic Memory project (~/Obsidian/Default), the default.

• Personal and career state that isn't an Atlas Crew product and isn't the Unanet job: job search, interviews, tax amendment, foreclosure/tenant situation, strategic positioning, misc research.
• This is the catch-all. If a topic doesn't clearly belong to products or work, it lands here.

Ephemeral conversation context → this chat. Promote to the right layer when worth keeping.

Picking the project

Operational Rules

1. Address the right project explicitly. Basic Memory MCP tools and basic-memory tool take a project (e.g. search-notes --project products). main is the default; pass --project work/--project products for the others. Searching the wrong project returns nothing and reads as "no such note."
2. Before reasoning about a specific repo, list its tracker first (backlog doc list for Cortex, gh issue list for atlas-crew repos) and pull the relevant item before concluding from stored memory.
3. Before reasoning about cross-cutting work, search the matching Basic Memory project (search, then read the note) before reasoning from stored memory.
4. When a chat surfaces something durable, propose writing it to the right layer — and use the Basic Memory skills to do it well: memory-notes (frontmatter/observations/relations), memory-ingest (unstructured input → entities), memory-research (research a subject → entity), memory-lifecycle (archive/status moves), memory-schema/memory-metadata-search (structured note types), memory-defrag/memory-reflect (periodic upkeep).
5. Don't duplicate content across layers. If something could plausibly live in two places (e.g. a product decision that's also a code task), ask Nick which layer owns it.

Failure Modes to Avoid

• Reasoning from stored memory summaries when fresher truth exists in a tracker or a Basic Memory project — produces stale or wrong answers.
• Searching one Basic Memory project and concluding the knowledge doesn't exist — it's almost certainly in one of the other two. There are three projects now; check the one that owns the topic.
• Writing sensitive Unanet material into the synced work project — it reaches the work laptop. Keep candid/proprietary content in the segregated local-only files.
• Putting Atlas Crew product strategy into a repo tracker, or code-task detail into the products project — knowledge drift across layers that compounds.
• Treating Obsidian as required — Nick doesn't run the Electron app. The projects are plain markdown; use the basic-memory CLI/MCP or any editor.
• Enumerating "Nick's repos" or which tracker a repo uses from memory and getting it wrong — ls ~/Developer/ and check the repo (backlog.md vs GitHub Issues).