Credo: Journal

Outcome: the idea, prediction, hindsight, or monthly review is appended to the user's journal with today's date, and the user returns to what they were doing. Over months the journal shows which judgments held. Carlini's best-paper essay says taste is built by attending to what worked and what did not; this file is where that attention lands.

The habit extends Carlini's ideas.txt: append-only, problems rather than solutions, read a few times a year so each idea is judged twice with time between, annotated in hindsight. Predictions are added so hindsight has something to compare against.

Scope

This skill runs only when the user invokes it by name: disable-model-invocation in Claude Code and allow_implicit_invocation: false in Codex keep it from loading on everyday phrases or project policies. Once invoked, record research ideas, predictions made at decisions about paper-bound work, and hindsight. The journal tracks the long-horizon portfolio the monthly review reads; routine task progress, product work, and individual runs stay in their existing records.

Locate the journal

Use the path the user names, else a journal path set in a section of your project's instruction file, else the CREDO_JOURNAL environment variable, else ~/research/journal.md. The journal is user data: never reformat, reorder, deduplicate, or edit past entries. Corrections are new dated entries that name the earlier date.

Append with the script

From the directory containing this SKILL.md: