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. The 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

Long-horizon work only (an uncertain claim or direction, a quarter or longer or a multi-month improvement the user owns, no deadline inside the next few weeks). Near-term tasks do not go in.

Locate the journal

Use the path named in the project's AGENTS.md owner settings, else the path the user names, 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: