Note Conventions

Scope note (2026-05-23). Describes conventions for the private vault (d:\Vault\AI Vault\). The Research/, Agents/, Sources/ paths below live in that vault, not in this Compendium repo. Compendium has its own structure — see the root README for the discipline-grouped layout (Sciences / Engineering-and-Robotics / Math-and-Compute / Society / Arts-and-Energy / Humanities / Walkthroughs / System).

Compendium is read-only with respect to other projects

Rule (2026-05-25). The Compendium is a reference library, not an operator. Agents working inside Compendium may:

• Read from anywhere on the machine (vault, project repos, runtime config) for context, learning, and synthesis;
• Write only inside d:\Vault\Compendium\ itself.

Agents working inside Compendium may not:

• Modify files in d:\Projects\<any-project>\ (Suits, TaxProfessional, IncomeProject, and any future project) without that project’s own agent expressly approving the change;
• Run git commit / git push in any other project’s repo;
• Trigger deploys, scheduled tasks, or background processes that affect any other project.

Why. The Compendium is intentionally a one-way knowledge dependency: other projects reference Compendium for facts and patterns; Compendium never reaches back into them. This keeps the Compendium safe to grow without coordinating with every consuming project, and it keeps each project’s history/state under its own agent’s control.

How to apply. If you find yourself dispatching an agent that wants to write outside d:\Vault\Compendium\ and outside the private vault, stop. Either route the task to the relevant project’s own agent, or leave a note here (with a clear “needs cross-project review”) and let the user dispatch it.

Exception — private vault. The user’s vault at d:\Vault\AI Vault\ is treated as user-personal storage, not a “project” in the project-agent sense. Compendium agents may write to the vault (e.g., save lesson notes per agents-learning-protocol) without triggering this rule.

File layout

• Research/Topics/<topic-slug>.md — durable topic notes (one per concept)
• Research/Sessions/<YYYY-MM-DD>/<slug>.md — per-session captures
• Research/Sources/<source-slug>.md — external references (URLs, papers)
• Agents/<agent-name>.md — per-agent memory & preferences

Markdown style

• H1 = note title (matches frontmatter)
• Use [[wikilinks]] for internal references
• Code blocks: triple-backtick + language tag
• Date format: ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ)

Tags

Use lowercase, dash-separated.

Library-canonical tag (one per note)

Every note carries exactly one library-canonical tag identifying which library it lives in:

Library	Canonical tag
Chemistry	chemistry-reference
Biology	biology-reference
MaterialsScience	materials-science-reference
ClimateScience	climate-reference
Engineering	engineering-reference
Robotics	robotics-reference
Math	math-reference
Compute	compute-reference
Languages	language-reference
Economics	economics-reference
Finance	finance-reference
Law	law-reference
EnergyMarkets	energy-markets-reference
Music	music-reference
Philosophy	philosophy-reference
History	history-reference
Linguistics	linguistics-reference
Anthropology	anthropology-reference
ReligiousStudies	religious-studies-reference
Walkthroughs	walkthroughs (no -reference suffix since walkthroughs aren’t a discipline)

Tier tag

Every note also carries tier1, tier2, or tier3 — plus family-index if it’s a T3 catalog, moc if it’s an index file.

Topical tags

Add 2-5 topical tags below the canonical for cross-cutting concepts. Examples: kinematics, oauth, gdpr, carbon-cycle, katex.

Bare-library tags (legacy + topical)

A bare library name (e.g., finance instead of finance-reference) is the topical form, used when a note from another library references a domain. Example: a Compute note about LLM-based financial-analytics tools might be tagged [compute-reference, t2, finance, llm] — the finance tag here means “this Compute note is about finance,” not “this note lives in the Finance library.”

Pre-2026-05 notes sometimes used bare library tags as the canonical. New notes should always use the -reference form for the canonical and reserve the bare form for the topical sense.

Suggested cross-cutting tags

• research, decision, pattern, gotcha, reference
• ai, obsidian, mcp, python, etc.
• outcome:accomplished, outcome:failed, outcome:partial, outcome:superseded (per agents-learning-protocol)