Cortex
Cortex Skill
What It Does
Operate Cortex, the LifeOS memory system, from one skill. Two halves: the Knowledge Archive — a curated, typed graph of notes across six entity domains (People, Companies, Ideas, Research, Blogs, Books), every note shipping typed related: cross-links so the archive is a connected graph, not a pile of files — and recall — finding prior work (sessions, ISAs, conversations) by topic or date phrase. Operations cover search, add, harvest, develop, ingest, contradiction-finding, graph traversal, compressed retrieval, conversation mining, the weekly distill pass, and session recall.
The Problem
Notes you save in isolation are notes you never find again. A flat folder of facts has no way to tell you that two notes contradict each other, that a new source updates an old claim, or that an idea connects to a person and a company you wrote up months ago. Knowledge dies when it can't be retrieved or related. This archive forces every note into a typed schema with mandatory cross-links and ripples updates through related notes on ingest, so the connections are built in at write time instead of being reconstructed by hand later.
How It Works
Manage the LifeOS Knowledge Archive at ~/.claude/LIFEOS/MEMORY/KNOWLEDGE/. Each operation routes through a subcommand below; notes follow the archive schema and ship with typed cross-links.
Archive schema: ~/.claude/LIFEOS/MEMORY/KNOWLEDGE/_schema.md
Hard rule — never write KNOWLEDGE/ directly. All writes route through this skill (add, harvest, ingest, develop) — never cp, mv, Write, or Edit straight into the directory, even during migration or bulk import. The skill enforces typed frontmatter, mandatory cross-links, and domain classification; raw filesystem writes skip those guarantees and corrupt the graph silently (broken links don't fail loudly — they produce phantom entries retrieval misses). Migration tooling MUST call this skill per chunk, never shell out to cp. The one sanctioned exception is the Algorithm's LEARN phase, which writes to KNOWLEDGE/ directly because it holds the best context and applies the same schemas (see Gotchas).