Epiphany/notes/eureka-pipeline-state-target.md

Eureka pipeline state: target

Status: target (the ends). The means live in notes/eureka-pipeline-state-cut.md, written by Imagination. Operator rulings are dated 2026-09-15 and 2026-09-16.

This target was rewritten on 2026-09-16 after the operator rejected the ownership model it had been built on. Rulings 5, 6, 10 and 13's store clauses, which put the store in the task's repo under a per-clone lease, are superseded by rulings 14-17 below. The cut map's Cut 3 sections describe the old model and are history, not live design.

Why

Eureka is the Claude Code counterpart of this organism. It is a skill, published as GameCult/Eureka and installed at ~/.claude/skills/eureka, that runs the same faculties (Self, Imagination, Hands, Soul, Mind Steward) over foundation changes. In its first campaign, the Aetheria CultCache migration, the pipeline worked, but its findings lived in prose: the cut map, subagent reports and memory files. Self re-read and re-summarised that prose at every step. Stale claims survived until a steward caught them. The postmortem needed a transcript crawl, and one operator quote survived only in a compaction summary.

Epiphany already has the other half: typed documents, admission and receipts. Her own notes/faculty-workflow-lessons-2026-09-04.md:146-176 proposes typed forms of Eureka's habits (Map, Spec, CutReport, Verdict, rulings, a landed-names digest), but none of them are built.

This campaign builds them once and gives Eureka agents access to them.

What the first model got wrong

The store was owned by a repo. Nothing owned the state, so the machinery grew to compensate: a per-clone writer lease, git-directory resolution, committed .gitattributes checks, and a merge tool for divergent copies. Three Soul passes went into propping that up, and it still resolved a store into a directory the operator never named.

Mind state also does not want version control. Git offers branches, merges and history rewriting; a mind wants one owner and an append-only record.

The operator's correction: someone owns the state. An instance owns its mind, and stewardship over repos is an assignment, not an identity. That is Epiphany's own design, and Eureka inherits it.

Operator rulings

1. Epiphany owns the schemas for pipeline state.
2. Searchable state serves agents first. Self and new agents rehydrate from it ("what rulings govern stores?", "what is still open?"). Soul and Imagination check precedent in it ("have nil map keys bitten us?"). Operator browsing across projects comes later.
3. Two campaigns. This one covers the schemas, the memory organ, admission, the Eureka MCP client and a proof on one real Eureka task. The second, Epiphany adopting Eureka's habits, comes after the schema stops moving.
4. Re-pin first. Landed: Epiphany moved from CultLib e171eca3 to a0813c6.
5. Q1-Q5 (2026-09-15), of which only Q2 and Q5 survive the rewrite: additive schema changes keep the epoch and a breaking bump refuses the old store (Q2); schemars is an unconditional epiphany-core dependency and the published JSON schemas are derived from the Rust types (Q5).
6. The operator channel is the Claude Code session. Eureka has no Persona. Self is the operator surface, because spec iteration works best where the question and the tree share a context. A blocking question may be pushed through whatever notification MCP the user configures; Eureka owns no transport and names no provider. Answers come back in the session. Answering over a chat channel is a later campaign and needs identity binding first.
7. Eureka is published as GameCult/Eureka, MIT.

Ownership (2026-09-16)

14. An instance owns its mind. A store is canonical to exactly one instance. Identity lives in the state, not in a path. Admission refuses a write carrying another instance's identity, whatever the transport. Stewardship over repos is an assignment recorded in that mind, and one instance may steward several repos. Reassignment is an explicit typed hand-off recorded in both minds, so history stays attributable.
15. A service owns the state, on Yggdrasil. The memory organ is a daemon: it outlives every session, owns a real resource dependency, and isolates a dead session from a corrupted mind. It earns its process under the GameCult daemon test. Minds are no longer committed to git, so there is no per-clone lease, no git-attribute precondition, and no divergence between clones.
16. The organ depends on Qdrant directly, not on voidbot. It owns its own collections and indexes at admission time. voidbot keeps its read-only public-repo retrieval; it is not in this path. Embeddings come from Ollama on Nightwing, the same stack GameCult already runs.
17. Huginn is the memory organ. The dormant .cc-to-Eve CLI is retired and generic .cc inspection belongs to CultCache Studio in CultLib. Huginn becomes the Rust service that owns instance minds, admission and the index, which also ends the standing authority vacancy where doctrine named Huginn the Persona-state steward of a runtime that never existed.

Shape decided with those rulings

• Transport: the organ speaks CultNet. eureka-state stays a local stdio MCP server that is a thin CultNet client, so the MCP surface stays swappable and the service protocol stays typed.
• Unreachable organ: refuse loudly and let the campaign stall on that step. No local spool, because that reintroduces two writers.
• Cut 3a code: keep the document kinds, keys, validation and typed refusals. Delete the store, lease and git layers, and re-point admission at the organ.

End state

• Documents. Epiphany defines the typed pipeline documents: campaign, target, question, ruling, cut spec, cut report, verdict, finding, follow-up, resolution. Each has a stable schema id and version, a derived key, and a live Eureka consumer. Schemas are derived from the Rust types and published in schemas/cultnet/index.json.
• Instance identity. A mind carries the instance that owns it and the repos it stewards. A campaign names its repo; the mind holds campaigns across every repo that instance stewards.
• The organ (Huginn). One service owns every mind it hosts:
  • admission, with per-document rules and typed refusals;
  • exact and filtered queries (by campaign, repo, cut, kind, status, supersession, time), "open items", and "rulings in force";
  • semantic search over its own Qdrant collections, indexed at admission;
  • a typed hand-off for reassigning stewardship, and an import path for another instance's mind;
  • supervised by Idunn, with a named backup owner for its volume.
• Eureka. The skill's briefs tell Self, Imagination, Hands and Soul to admit and query typed state instead of relaying prose. eureka-state is the thin MCP client, registered at user scope.
• Proof. One real Eureka task runs end to end on typed state: rulings admitted, a cut spec, Hands' cut report, Soul findings, follow-ups queried back, and a fresh agent rehydrating from queries alone.

Invariants

• One owner. Exactly one instance owns a mind, and the organ is its only writer. Eureka agents and the MCP client are clients; the index is a projection.
• Identity travels with the write. An admission carries the instance, and a foreign instance is refused.
• Typed, not prose. No JSON store and no blob fields where a typed field exists. JSON appears only in published schemas.
• Mind state is not in version control. Campaign prose (target, cut map) stays in the repo; the mind does not.
• Supersession, not deletion. An old ruling or finding stays queryable as superseded.
• The skill defers to the schema. Eureka describes how to use the state; the schema set and admission rules are owned here.
• Availability is honest. When the organ is unreachable, Eureka refuses and says so. It never writes a second copy.

Not in scope

• Epiphany's own organs consuming pipeline documents: the second campaign.
• Operator browsing surfaces (Eve/CultUI) over pipeline state.
• Answering operator questions over a chat channel.
• Migrating the Aetheria CultCache campaign's prose into typed documents.
• Cleanup of .epiphany-run/ (105 GiB) and the repo-local target/ (39 GiB).
• Huginn's legacy .voidbot Persona state, which needs its own admission decision.

Evidence

• Substrate maps (scratch, 2026-09-15): Epiphany typed state and admission; the MCP and client landscape.
• Dated comparison: ~/.claude/skills/eureka/references/epiphany-comparison-2026-09-15.md.
• Campaign precedent: F:\Projects\Aetheria\docs\cultcache-migration-postmortem.md.
• Huginn's dormancy and authority vacancy: F:\Projects\gamecult-ops\docs\repo-census-2026-09\repos\Huginn.md.