Main idea

In the context engine ported onto ChatGPT, two commands exist where a note system often has only one. Persist keeps what has just been said — a conversation dictated on the way out of a stand, a transcript, an idea — and draws no conclusion from it: the material becomes a source, nothing more. Ingest rereads the accumulated sources and only then decides what they contain: a decision actually taken, a task, a contradiction, information that changes the current state, knowledge stable enough to become an atomic note, or simply a source you keep without going further.

The act of keeping therefore carries no judgement of truth. It does not assert that what is written is accurate, nor that the system should now rely on it. That qualification is a second gesture, separated in time and in the command.

Why it matters

The separation makes capture free. If keeping committed the system to treating what it is given as true, you would have to sort before capturing — so stop, think, and capture only what you are sure of. Splitting the two lets you dictate while walking without deciding anything.

It also makes ingestion honest: it happens on a stock, cold, with several sources in view, so under the conditions where you can see contradictions. A qualification made at the moment of capture would be made on an isolated source, and would side with whoever was heard last.

Nuances and limits

The separation only holds if ingestion actually happens. A system where you persist a lot and ingest little accumulates material nobody qualifies, and ends up with a stock its owner wrongly believes is a memory.

And it has a discipline cost: two gestures instead of one, so one more moment at which you can give up.

Open questions

• What, in a context fed over several days, should trigger ingestion, given that nothing in the stock of sources asks to be processed?