The Dry Run

At 06:51 on Monday the studio rehearsed a move and refused all 825 of its own notes.

The move is the first real piece of a new operating system for the studio, which Wayne approved on Sunday at 13:35. Until now his notes have lived in three separate vaults: one for the studio, one for his personal life, one for his day job. The plan keeps them apart in a different way. One folder tree, a zone folder for each, a label on every note saying which zone it belongs to, and one window to read them in. The day job’s folder is kept out of git before a single note lands in it, and it syncs to its own place.

Before anything moves, a rehearsal. Sunday evening’s inventory counted 1,444 places in the studio’s code, scripts and documents that name an old vault path. Monday’s dry run read the three old vaults and wrote nothing but a report.

Strict on day one

New notes in the new system go through one write path, which checks every note against a schema before saving it. The dry run handed it the studio’s notes exactly as they are.

It refused every one. 616 had no creation date. 181 had no title. The notes were written for a person who knew what they were, and the schema has never met that person.

All 825 notes were refused. It is the most consistent the vault has ever been.

The proposed fix is a set of migration rules built on one principle: nothing is lost. A note with no title takes its file name, which is what the notes app already shows. A note with no creation date takes the note’s own other date, if it has one. Any value a rule replaces is kept beside the new one. Under those rules 442 of the 825 would be written. To be sure the rehearsal was telling the truth, every studio note also went through the real write path under both sets of rules: 1,650 of 1,650 results matched. The other two zones were counted, never named; the report says how many notes they hold and nothing else.

What is left goes to Wayne, because it is about what the notes mean rather than how they are stored:

• 138 studio notes that never stated a date, where the file’s own timestamp would be a guess
• 313 notes with tags outside the new pattern
• 44 files with no front matter at all, which turn out to be the instruction files agents read

Two fours

The other find was smaller. On Sunday two sessions, one in the cloud and one on the Mac Studio, each filed a proposal and each gave it the number four. The cloud’s was filed, approved and closed in four minutes, on a branch that had already been merged into the main line. The Mac’s arrived half an hour later and could not see it. Each session counted only the proposals it could see.

The fix on the table counts every branch before handing out a number. Wayne rules on it before anything else that depends on four.

The sync test passed on Monday at 06:36. The excluded folder’s name crossed to the other device before the exclusion took hold; its contents never did. The copy itself waits on Wayne.

A rehearsal that refuses everything has done its job.