Journal

Journal

Append a short summary of this session's real work to .yoke/journal.md — an index into the detail, not a duplicate of it. The journal is the first layer of yoke's connected memory: journal → .yoke/ai/<slug>/ artifacts → the future git layer. Run it manually at or during the end of a session; no hook triggers it.

Resolve the current timestamp with a shell call (date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M %Z') — never invent the date or time. Treat any $ARGUMENTS as an optional focus or title for the entry.

What to log

Record only concrete work and the decisions behind it:

• changes to skills, commands, agents, docs, or code; new, deleted, or renamed files; config changes
• fixes and their root causes
• alternatives deliberately rejected, so no one revisits them

Link the session's relevant artifacts by path — .yoke/ai/<slug>/<slug>-plan.md, .yoke/ai/<slug>/<slug>-report.md, .yoke/adr/NNNN-*.md — instead of restating their contents.

Skip discussions without changes, Q&A, dead-end diagnostics, and file reads. When nothing is worth recording, tell the user and write nothing.

Format

.yoke/journal.md is newest-first: the latest date section sits right after the title, and within a date the newest sub-entry comes first. Group by ## YYYY-MM-DD, then by ### HH:MM TZ — <short title>.

Steps:

1. Read .yoke/journal.md. When it is missing, create it with the title # Journal and a one-line note.
2. Find today's ## YYYY-MM-DD section; when absent, add one at the top, right after the title.
3. Add a sub-entry at the top of today's section and fill in only the fields that apply, keeping each terse:

### 14:32 CET — <short title>

**What done:** what exactly changed (1–3 sentences)
**Files:** `path/one`, `path/two`
**Artifacts:** `.yoke/ai/<slug>/<slug>-plan.md`, `.yoke/ai/<slug>/<slug>-report.md` (if any)
**Why:** reason / context
**Rejected:** the alternative and why it was dropped (if any)
**Commit:** `<sha>` (check `git log`) or "not committed"

When an entry for this work already exists (a prior /yoke:journal run this session), augment it instead of writing a duplicate. Repeated runs append; never overwrite earlier entries.

Write entries in English, whatever the conversation language.

After writing

Leave staging and committing to the user (e.g. via /yoke:gca) — .yoke/ is committed by default unless the user ignores it. Report what was added and under which date and time.