linkedin-studio/docs/second-brain/ingest-manual-import.md

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.

# 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.