# Manual-import contract — ingest + the published gold signal (SB-S1)

> The contract for getting your **actual published posts** into the second brain as the
> **gold signal** (`provenance=published`) that voice/profile learning is allowed to learn from.
> Part of the second-brain arc (`architecture.md`); landed in SB-S1.

## Why this exists

Profile and voice must learn from **human-published content only** — never from what the engine
itself drafted. A content engine that learns its own voice from its own drafts collapses toward its
own priors (model collapse). So the brain has one provenance vocabulary — `human | published | ai-draft`
— and the learning surfaces are bound to `published` and **forbidden from `provenance=ai-draft`**.

A published post already lands in three non-referencing places today (the state file's `## Recent Posts`,
the dead `analytics/content-history.md`, and `analytics/posts/*.json` from the CSV) — but **none of them
holds the full post text**. Voice learning needs the verbatim text, so `ingest/published/` storing it is
additive, not a re-count. (Threading a shared id across those silos is a later slice, SB-S3.)

## The drop-zone model

```
${LINKEDIN_STUDIO_DATA:-$HOME/.claude/linkedin-studio}/ingest/
  inbox/        # drop-zone: paste a published post here as a .md file (manual, or a future connector)
  published/    # processed gold records, provenance=published — one file per post, <id>.md
```

- **`inbox/`** — you drop raw post files here (top-level `*.md`, one post per file).
- **`published/`** — the `ingest` CLI writes processed, provenance-tagged records here. `<id>.md` where
  `<id> = sha256(verbatim body)[:12]` — byte-identity, so the same post never duplicates and two
  genuinely different posts never collide.

## CLI usage

Run from `scripts/brain` (`node --import tsx src/cli.ts <cmd>`), or via the package's `start` script.

```bash
# one post from a file → ingest/published/<id>.md, tagged provenance=published
brain ingest --file path/to/post.md [--source manual] [--date 2026-05-26]

# process everything dropped in ingest/inbox/ (top-level *.md, skips dotfiles), non-destructive
brain ingest --scan-inbox

# inspect the gold corpus — id · provenance · date · first line (eyeball that nothing ai-draft leaked)
brain published list [--json]
```

- `--date` is the real publish date; it defaults to the ingest date when omitted.
- Re-ingesting the same body is a **no-op** (idempotent). An id-collision with a *differing* body is
  disambiguated to `<id>-2.md` — a differing gold record is **never silently dropped**.
- `ingest` **creates `ingest/published/` on demand** — it does not require a prior `brain init`.

## Record file grammar (no YAML)

One file per post: a fixed five-line header, a `---` sentinel, then the **verbatim body**.

```
id: 1a2b3c4d5e6f
provenance: published
published_date: 2026-05-26
captured_at: 2026-06-23
source: manual
---
The verbatim post body goes here.

It may contain anything — blank lines, ] | characters, even a line that looks
like --- — because the parser splits on the FIRST sentinel only.
```

`parse ∘ serialize` is an exact identity over all six fields including the body. A record in
`published/` whose `provenance` is anything other than `published` is treated as a **corruption signal**
and rejected on parse.

## The published-only learning rule (and its honest limit)

- `agents/voice-trainer.md` is wired to read `ingest/published/` as its primary gold source and to
  **exclude `provenance=ai-draft` unconditionally**. This wiring is **gate-enforced** by a structure-lint
  (`scripts/test-runner.sh`, the Brain Published-Only Invariant section): the lint asserts the agent
  carries both the `ingest/published` source and the `provenance=ai-draft` exclusion.
- **Honest limit:** the *wiring* is gate-enforced, but an agent instruction can still be ignored at
  runtime — the gate proves the rule is present, not that the model obeyed it on a given run. The
  strongest enforcement short of executing the agent.

## What SB-S1 does NOT do

No consolidation loop and **no automatic `brain/profile.md` mutation** (SB-S2 owns the sleep-time
profile-diff loop) · no session-start wiring · no cross-silo id threading (SB-S3) · no connector
(SB-S4). `source` carries a forward-compatible field for a future connector, but no connector code ships.