Coldstart is in final cutover and has not been released. The behavior on this page runs in the development build; there is no release you can install today.
A map is the list of what is filed and where. It sits at the root of the record and at the root of each room, and it is not written by anyone. It is regenerated from the files it describes.
That one choice is the whole page. A hand-maintained list is a second source of truth, and it becomes wrong the first time somebody adds an item and forgets a row. A projection of what is actually on disk has no such failure mode, because the way to fix a map that looks wrong is to regenerate it.
[Visual 3.2 — Two columns with a wide arrow between them. The left column is the source: a folder tree with rooms, compartments and cards, labelled "authored — the only thing anyone edits". The right column is the projection: a table whose rows carry only four kinds of value, each tagged where it came from — a name, a path, a card's own subject line, a count. The wide arrow points left to right and is labelled "regenerate — rewrite whole from the tree". A second, thinner arrow runs right to left above it, labelled "--check — regenerate to memory and byte-compare; any difference is a failing check". A dashed box hangs off the arrow's midpoint listing what cannot pass through it: "no prose, no commentary, no hand-added row" with the caption "not forbidden — unproducible". Two crossed-out icons sit outside the frame entirely, a hand holding a pen over the right column and a folder being created, labelled "the generator never edits a map by hand and never restructures the tree".]
What a map is allowed to contain
Every value in a generated map is one of four things: a name, a path, an item's own one-line subject, or a count. There is no field through which anything else could arrive.
That is a stronger property than a rule against writing prose in a map. A map with a paragraph in it is not a map that broke a rule; it is a string the generator cannot produce. So comparing a file on disk against a fresh regeneration catches two different problems in one operation: an item that is missing from the list, and payload that was added to it by hand.
The same restraint governs scope. Each map lists only its own children — the record root lists its rooms, and each room lists its own items by compartment. No map covers another map's territory, so there is never a question of which list is authoritative for a given item.
Regenerate, or check
The generator runs in two modes, and the second is what makes the first trustworthy.
Regenerate rewrites every map from the current tree. It is safe to run at any time and running it twice changes nothing the second time, because the output is a function of the input.
Check does the same derivation without writing, compares the result against what is on disk, and fails when they differ, naming the file that moved. That is the parity check: it converts "someone may have edited a map" and "someone may have forgotten to regenerate" into a red result that a close or a maintenance pass can act on.
There is a second projection built the same way. The index that routes a request to a reusable capability is derived wholesale from each routable item's own declared metadata, so a capability cannot quietly become unreachable by someone forgetting to add a row. It has the same two modes and the same guarantee. What that index is then used for is the next section's subject.
What the generator refuses to do
The generator re-lists and nothing else, and the boundary is drawn on purpose.
It refuses to half-generate. If any item in the tree cannot be parsed, nothing is written and the defect is reported with its path. Writing the maps anyway would silently drop that item from the list, which is exactly the drift the mechanism exists to prevent, so a partial map is treated as worse than no run at all.
It never creates a room, never moves an item, and never decides that a room has grown too big. Those are structural changes, they need judgment, and a tool that quietly reorganises your record while updating its index would be doing two jobs with only one of them announced. Splitting a room is a deliberate act you take; regenerating the map afterwards is the mechanical half that follows.
It never edits an authored file. The maps are machine-owned and the items are yours, and the two sets do not overlap. That separation is what makes it safe to run the generator without reading its diff first.
When it runs
The regeneration is mechanical and cheap, so it runs as part of a normal close rather than being something to remember. The parity check runs alongside the project's other checks, which means a stale map surfaces as a red check in the ordinary flow rather than as a discovery weeks later.
Running it by hand is worth doing after anything that moved or renamed a lot of files, and after any pass where you edited the record heavily. It is also the correct first response to a map that looks wrong: regenerate, and read what changed.
Limits
A map proves that the list matches the disk. That is all it proves.
It is not evidence that the record is complete, that the items are current, or that anything filed is correct. A regenerated map over a set of stale decisions is a perfectly accurate index of stale decisions, and it will pass every check on this page while doing it.
It cannot see what was never filed. The projection lists what exists; nothing in it can notice a decision that was made in conversation and never written down, which is the most common way a record goes wrong.
The parity check is only as useful as its running. It is wired into the close and into the maintenance pass, so a project whose sessions close properly gets it automatically. A project where closes are skipped gets stale projections and no signal, and no part of this mechanism can compel the close to happen.
Finally, the guarantee is about drift, not about quality. It removes one specific failure — an index that disagrees with reality — and it is worth having precisely because that failure is silent and cumulative. It does not make the record good.
Next
That is what a fresh session can find. The next question is what instruction reaches it, and why the answer is not "load everything": guidance.
How current this page is
Checked on 10 August 2026 against the product's current map generation, its parity check and its recorded release state. It describes what regeneration guarantees, not evidence that indexed projects are easier to work in. To ask whether a claim here still holds, or to report one that does not, write to [email protected].