Main idea

Three layers can be told apart in a knowledge base maintained by an agent: the books, the PDFs and the standards on one side, the Markdown files produced by the agent on the other, and the instruction file that says how to get from one to the other. The separation is not a filing convenience, it fixes what is authoritative.

Sources cannot be reconstituted; the wiki, for its part, can be remade. Correcting an ingestion rule and rerunning produces a new version of the notes, which makes the intermediate layer disposable in the strict sense — losing it destroys nothing irreplaceable as long as the sources and the instructions are there.

An answer drawn from the wiki therefore stays sourced on the standard, never on the note that summarizes it. Treating the wiki as the reference amounts to silently inheriting the choices made during extraction: what was kept, what was set aside, under what vocabulary the idea was restated.

Why it matters

This licenses what would otherwise look reckless: hardening the rules and re-ingesting everything. A derived layer is destroyed without deliberation, whereas you would hesitate for a long time before a base regarded as capital.

And it gives a citation criterion. What a note asserts must be reopenable in the original document; a note that no longer points anywhere has stopped being derived without anyone having decided it.

Nuances and limits

Regeneration is neither free nor faithful: a new pass over the same sources does not give back the same notes, and the later base is not the earlier one improved.

Above all, the human work deposited in the wiki — a correction, a ruling between two sources, a link laid by hand — is not derived. It disappears on re-ingestion if it has not been pushed back into the rules.

Open questions

• Where do you record a correction made by hand in a derived artifact, so that it survives its next regeneration?