Reciprocal Session Journal Metadata
Made captured session updates and journals explicitly traceable in both directions.
Tags: Abbey Root
Reciprocal Session Journal Metadata
Summary
Abbey already created session updates and journals together, despite an AI recommendation that described journal creation as a separate recurring manual step. What remained missing was an explicit relationship inside the artifacts.
Capture now writes the journal path into the session update and the session update path into the journal. Project policy still decides whether a journal exists, so optional and event-driven sessions do not gain dangling metadata.
Accomplishments
- Added reciprocal relative-path metadata during session capture.
- Added safe preflight checks and idempotent repair on rerun.
- Rejected conflicting associations before changing counterpart artifacts.
- Preserved required, event-driven, optional, and explicit override behavior.
- Expanded focused regression coverage and documented the contract.
Lessons Learned
- AI recommendations need implementation review even when they cite a genuine backlog item; the cited friction may already have been removed.
- Shared filenames are useful convention, but explicit metadata makes artifact relationships directly discoverable and verifiable.
- Safe resume workflows must distinguish a missing link from a conflicting one.
Next Steps
- Exercise the reciprocal fields through normal session review and publishing before expanding relationship automation.