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. It holds the offhand thing a buyer said, the reason a deal really slipped, and 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.

What Goes In: Sort, Check, Write

Ingest starts by sorting the content by type. The types are a transcript, a document, notes, a call, or a meeting. Each type gives up what matters. A transcript gives up its decisions, commitments, and direct quotes. A document gives up its thesis and evidence. Notes give up their ideas and open questions.

Before anything new is created, Ingest checks for an existing record. If one exists with the same subject, it adds a dated timeline entry instead of creating a duplicate. If one exists in a different context, the new item links to it as a related concept. A person gets one record, always.

Two Zones In Every Note

Each item has two permanent zones. The top is compiled truth, the current best understanding, rewritten as evidence changes. The bottom is a timeline that is dated, reverse chronological, append-only, and keeps exact quotes word for word.

When you re-read something six months later and find you were wrong, the top gets rewritten and a new entry goes on the bottom. The top can be wrong and fixed. The bottom is the audit trail.

Connect And Save

Every new item links to two to five related items. An item with zero links is an orphan, and an orphan is unfindable except by accident. New items usually start as emergent, with the source and the date of the original content on them.

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 feed the pile that Dream prunes and Graph Health measures. Weekly Review checks whether ingestion is keeping up. Capture without a pruning cadence is how a knowledge base becomes an archive nobody trusts.