Ingest

Reach for Ingest whenever information arrives in a form nobody will search six weeks from now.

• A customer call just ended and the useful part is in your head.
• A long Slack thread reached a decision that lives nowhere else.
• A deck, a contract, or a competitor teardown landed in your inbox.
• You caught yourself saying "I know we discussed this somewhere".

The test is simple. If the next person to need this would have to ask you, it needs to be ingested.

Every operator has a private layer of context that never reaches the system: the offhand thing a buyer said, the reason a deal really slipped, the competitor detail from a hallway conversation. It works until the team grows, the quarter turns, or you are the bottleneck on a question only you can answer.

Ingest is the pass that moves that layer out of your head and into a shape the system can retrieve. Not storage. Retrieval is the whole point.

Capture Beats Recall

The reason capture wins is not effort, it is decay. Detail is richest at the moment it arrives and drops fast. An entry written within an hour of a call carries specifics. The same entry written on Friday carries a vibe.

So Ingest is optimized for speed of capture, not beauty of output. A rough structured entry beats a polished one that never got written.

The Four Fields That Make An Entry Retrievable

1. Subject. The person, account, or decision it attaches to. One anchor, not three.
2. Claim. What is actually being asserted, in one sentence, in plain language.
3. Source and date. Where it came from and when. Undated intelligence becomes unusable within a quarter.
4. Confidence. Observed, reported, or inferred. This field does more work than the other three combined.

That confidence field is the one people skip. Without it, a guess and a signed contract read identically six months later.

What Not To Ingest

Volume is the enemy of retrieval. Three rules keep the base usable:

• No transcripts. A transcript is a recording with extra steps. Ingest the claims inside it.
• No opinions without an owner. "Procurement is slow" is noise. "Their GC said review takes three weeks" is intelligence.
• No restatements. If an entry already says it, add the date to the existing one instead of creating a second record.

Expiry Is Part Of Capture

Anything about pricing, headcount, org structure, or roadmap gets an expiry date at the moment of capture. Ninety days is the usual default. This is what lets the Dream pass prune later without guessing, and it costs four seconds now against a stale claim in circulation later.

Where It Sits In The Loop

Wrap-Up and Ingest are the two creation passes. Wrap-Up closes a working session, Ingest captures inbound material. Both of them feed the pile that Dream prunes and Graph Health measures. Capture without a pruning cadence is how a knowledge base becomes an archive nobody trusts.