Capture

Capture — session → minute

A minute is the faithful, low-authority record of one session: what was attempted, what was decided, what changed, what's still open. It is the raw material the canon is later compiled from, and the provenance every cabinet claim points back to. It is append-only — write this session's entry; never edit another session's.

Where it goes

<workspace>/logbook/<YYYY>/<MM>/<safe-session-id>.md (workspace name from bureau.json, default canon). Sanitize the session id first — keep only [A-Za-z0-9_-], drop everything else (no /, no ..); fall back to unknown if empty. The raw session id is untrusted and must never reach a filesystem path. If a mechanical SessionEnd stub already exists at that path, enrich it in place: re-emit a clean frontmatter block (preserve meaning, not the stub's raw bytes), then replace the body.

Entry schema

Frontmatter is the press's SIMPLE parser — it does NOT strip quotes and does NOT do YAML escaping. So titles are unquoted, every rendered value is a single safe line, and no value contains ", a newline, or [ ] |. The one exception is transcript: — a bureau-internal field consumed by bureau (not rendered as a clean value by the press), stored as a JSON-escaped string so an arbitrary path is safe.

---
title: session <safe-session-id> · <YYYY-MM-DD>
updated: <YYYY-MM-DD>
status: logbook
session: <safe-session-id>
transcript: "<transcript path, JSON-escaped if present, else empty>"
---

## [<ISO-8601>] session <id8> — <one-line summary>

**Intent.** What this session set out to do (1–2 sentences).

**Decisions.**
- <decision> — implies dossier **<Page name>** (link with `[[Page]]` only if it already exists)

**Changes.**
- <path or artifact> (new | updated | removed) — <why>

**Open threads.**
- <unresolved question / next step>

**Source.** transcript `<path>`

Rules

1. Faithful over polished. Record what actually happened, including dead ends and reversals — the logbook is history, not a press release.
2. Decisions name their target — but don't ship dangling links. Name the dossier a decision implies. Use a [[link]] ONLY if that page already exists; otherwise write the page name as plain text. bureau:compile creates the page and wires the provenance later.
3. No canon writes. Capture NEVER edits dossiers. Distillation into the SSOT is a separate, deliberate step (bureau:compile).
4. Safe, unique title. Use the FULL sanitized session id in the title — session <safe-session-id> · <date> — so two sessions whose ids share a prefix can't collide into a duplicate title (the press rejects duplicate titles). Unquoted, free of " / [ ] |. The <id8> short form is fine inside the body heading, not the title.
5. One session, one file. Don't merge sessions; don't rewrite earlier entries.

What this is NOT

Not a summary of the codebase, not a to-do list, not the truth. It is the minutes of one meeting. Truth is adjudicated later, in the cabinets, under consistency checks.

Examples

Scope note

This skill covers ONLY the logbook-capture protocol — turning one session into one faithful, append-only minute. It does not distil entries into dossiers (that is bureau:compile), does not render or open the gazette (that is bureau:inspect), and does not check consistency (that is bureau:lint).

Consumed by:

• the bureau:file-session command (writes the rich entry interactively, in-session);
• the SessionEnd hook → scripts/capture-stub.mjs (writes the mechanical stub this skill later enriches).