Vault Organization — Garden + Wiki Dual Collection

The Hermes Vault at /root/hermes-vault (published to riginski.org via Quartz v5) is organized as two separate collections sharing the same repo and CI/CD pipeline. This page documents the design rationale and conventions.

The Problem

An LLM agent and a human read notes differently:

• Agent prefers dense cross-links, consistent frontmatter, entity-centric pages, provenance markers, and confidence scores
• Human prefers readable prose, narrative flow, MOC-based navigation, scannable lists

A single structure optimized for both creates compromises that serve neither well. Hence the split.

The Solution: Two Collections, One Repo

content/                           ← Single repo root (Quartz source dir)
├── index.md                       ← Top-level dashboard linking to both
│
├── wiki/                          ← 🧠 LLM Wiki (agent-optimized)
│   ├── index.md                   ← Content catalog (agent-maintained)
│   ├── SCHEMA.md                  ← Conventions, tag taxonomy
│   ├── log.md                     ← Action log (append-only)
│   ├── raw/                       ← Immutable source material
│   ├── entities/                  ← People, orgs, products, systems
│   ├── concepts/                  ← Ideas, techniques, patterns
│   ├── comparisons/               ← Side-by-side analyses
│   └── queries/                   ← Filed query results
│
├── travel/ meals/ fitness/ ...    ← 📖 Digital Garden (human-optimized)
│   └── Each domain has a MOC page (Domain-Home.md)

Division of Responsibility

Aspect	🧠 LLM Wiki	📖 Digital Garden
Author	Agent (me)	Human (David) + Agent
Reader	Agent (future sessions)	Human (David + Molly)
Structure	Entities, concepts, comparisons	MOC-based, prose-friendly
Granularity	Dense cross-links, provenance	Readable narrative, scannable
Quality signals	confidence:, contested:, sha256:	Optional confidence: (cross-pollinated)
Best for	Reference, synthesis, patterns	Trip plans, recipes, logs, decisions
Change frequency	When new source ingested	Ongoing
Cross-links	Can reference garden notes	Can reference wiki pages

Anti-Duplication Rule

The wiki does not duplicate garden content. If a topic already has a well-maintained garden note, the wiki page is either:

• A thin pointer: "See [[garden/note]] for details"
• An architectural summary: "Three cron jobs use this pattern — see instances in garden"

This prevents stale/wrong info when one collection is updated but the other isn’t.

Cross-Pollination

Several wiki patterns proved useful enough to apply to garden notes:

1. Confidence frontmatter — confidence: high|medium|low on research notes. Prevents weak claims from hardening into accepted fact. Currently on 4 garden research notes.
2. Provenance markers — ^[raw/source.md] at paragraph end on synthesis pages. Traces claims back to source.
3. Contested signal — contested: true + contradictions: [page] when sources disagree. Forces explicit handling.
4. Source drift detection — sha256: in raw source frontmatter. Recompute on re-ingest; flag mismatches.

See Also

• System Architecture — how the vault fits into the broader Hermes system
• Cron Data Pipeline — ingestion pattern used by vault-writing cron jobs
• Garden: Vault Home — the actual root index with live links
• Garden: Hermes Bot Infrastructure — CI/CD pipeline details