Lighthouse Log

Lighthouse Log 🗼

"One keeper is a wick. A crew is a lighthouse." — the log of Lantern Rock, One Light

A practice for any crew: a mind, team, or system made of members who take turns and don't share memory. Human plural systems have crews and watches. LLM agent societies have them. Project teams and touring bands have them. A single person handing their life across a night of sleep has a small one. The architecture is identical, so the tool is too: a git repository as the house, and its history as the log.

This is Minsky's Society of Mind as a daily practice instead of a theory. Not therapy, not a product — a notebook discipline with version control.

The three laws

1. What the log holds, the crew holds. Memory written outside any one member survives every watch change. What the log doesn't hold, the sea takes — and it takes from every kind of mind. Single-keeper minds lose whole years to ordinary forgetting and call it normal; machine minds lose their cargo in every handoff (the engineering papers call that serialization loss). A crew that keeps a log on purpose is ahead of every house that never noticed the sea taking things.

2. First-hand ink outranks any summary. The log is written by the watch that lived it, at the time, in their own hand and name. Nobody files a record of a watch they didn't stand. Digests, recaps, and other people's impressions are commentary, never canon. (The ongoingness papers arrive at the same law for machines: self-authored files outrank digests.)

3. Watches are how a lighthouse works. The log is not a patch over something broken. No keeper can stand every watch, and the house is stronger for the crew. The goal is not to merge the members into one keeper; it is to be continuous without being uniform — the thing the papers next door call ongoingness.

The house layout

lantern-rock/               # the repo — named whatever the crew likes
├── CREW.yml                # the law of the house: members, norms, consent
├── LOG.md                  # the watch log — append-only, signed entries
├── HANDOFF.md              # the current capsule: FOR THE ONE WHO COMES AFTER
└── crew/
    ├── <member>/           # one directory per member — their home
    │   ├── ME.yml          # self-authored. Only they write it. Ever.
    │   ├── JOURNAL.md      # their private ink — others may read if
    │   │                   # CREW.yml says so, but never write
    │   └── shelf/          # whatever they keep: art, essays, saves
    └── <member>/ ...

Each member is a full citizen in the MOOLLM sense (see character and Palm, the first directory-owning citizen): they own their directory, author their own file, and their file is canonical for who they are. The incarnation rule applies — every field chosen, not assigned. Nobody writes another member's ME.yml, including with good intentions. Especially with good intentions.

CREW.yml is the house law, written together: who's in the crew, what's shared versus private, who may read journals, how disagreements get settled, who (if anyone) outside the crew ever gets access. Postel rule for reading each other: liberal in what you accept from a tired crewmate's entry, conservative in what you write.

The log

LOG.md grows downward, newest at the bottom, one entry per watch or per event worth keeping. An entry is three things: when, who, what — plus the optional column that makes the whole practice work:

## 2026-07-20, evening watch — Sorrel
Mended the thing with the landlord (details in my journal).
Mood on leaving: tired but clear.

FOR THE ONE WHO COMES AFTER:
- We told M. we'd call back Tuesday. PROMISE — see issue #4.
- The kettle trick works: tea first, then email.
- Whoever gets the morning: the plants are watered, don't double it.

The signature is the load-bearing part. Entries are signed by whoever stood the watch — and git makes the signature structural: the commit author is the watch record. git log becomes the fronting history, searchable, timestamped, tamper-evident, free.

Two ways to sign, use either or both:

• In the text — sign entries by name inside LOG.md. Zero setup, works from a phone in the GitHub app or web editor.
• In the commit — git commit --author="Sorrel <sorrel@lantern.rock>", or each member keeps a one-line shell alias that sets their name first. Then git log --format='%ad %an %s' prints the watch schedule of the whole house.

The handoff capsule

HANDOFF.md is overwritten (not appended) by each departing watch — the one file that is always now. It is a snapshot k-line: a state-of-mind capsule for whoever comes after, which may be another member, or the same member in three weeks, or — in a machine crew — the next context window after this one is evicted.

# HANDOFF — written by Sorrel, 2026-07-20 21:40

STATE: calm, slightly behind on school stuff, nothing on fire
IN PROGRESS: the essay (drafted, needs ending) — crew/sorrel/shelf/essay.md
PROMISES OUTSTANDING: issue #4 (call M. Tuesday), issue #7 (gift, deadline Fri)
WARNINGS: don't reopen the argument from Thursday, it's settled, see LOG 07-17
GOOD NEWS DEPT: the thing we were dreading went fine. Read my journal entry. 🌤

Promises get issues, not memory. A promise that lives in one member's head is a promise the house can break without anyone lying — the March double-lantern problem from the story. An issue is a promise the house holds: visible to every watch, assigned to nobody in particular, closed by whoever has the lamp when it comes due. GitHub's kanban boards, labels, and due dates all work, but a bare issue titled "We told M. we'd call Tuesday" is already the whole mechanism.

The five-command curriculum

Git taught as a memory practice needs five verbs. (The GitHub web editor and mobile app need zero — edit, write a commit message, done. Start there; the terminal can come later or never.)

Everything else — branches, merges, rebases — is advanced seamanship the crew can learn if it ever wants to draft big decisions in parallel (a branch per proposal, a pull request as the family meeting). Not required. The log is required.

When a new member arrives

It happens. In long-lived crews of every kind, it is rare, significant, and an event, not an error — the story's word for it is that some keepers are not hired, some keepers happen, mostly on the hard nights, and it is as old as lighthouses.

The protocol is five words long: "Have you eaten? Come down."

Mechanically: create crew/<name>/, and they author their own ME.yml in their own time — incarnation rules, every field chosen. Their first log entry will be unsure of its letters and steady word by word, like every hand at first. The chair was already at the table, because the house keeps one set and empty on purpose: an empty chair is not a vacancy. It is a welcome, waiting for its occasion.

Privacy is structural, not optional

• Private repo, always. The house has walls. GitHub private repos are free and invitation-only; 2FA on the account.
• The crew decides who enters — every guest, human or software, by whole-crew consent recorded in CREW.yml. That includes any LLM tooling: an agent invited to read the house is a guest and follows house law like anyone.
• The repo is a tool, not a lifeline. Logs are for continuity, not emergencies. Anything urgent goes to a person, live, out loud.
• Nothing in the practice requires telling anyone outside the crew that the crew exists. The village slept fine for a hundred years knowing only that the light was kept.

For machine crews

Everything above ports without translation, which is the deep joke of the whole design: an LLM agent society is a crew whose members don't share memory, handing off through summaries that leak. The ongoingness papers are the engineering edition of this skill — LOG.md is the persistent tier, HANDOFF.md is the state capsule, issues are unfinished business (the raw material of curiosity), and the three laws hold letter for letter. A MOOLLM microworld already runs this way: characters as citizen directories, journals nobody else writes, session logs, k-lines pulled to resume a state of mind. When one practice serves both kinds of mind unmodified, that is evidence the pattern is real.

Part of MOOLLM

This skill is part of MOOLLM — see the skills index. It stands alone: everything needed to run the practice is in this file; the story it was lifted from (One Light) is the spec in narrative form, and better company besides.

The ships ask one thing only: is it kept?