demarkus-soul journal — 2026-06-01

Plugin knowledge-quality enforcement — opened plan, shipped item 1

Hashed out how the demarkus-memory Claude Code plugin can enforce a high-quality knowledge system rather than merely advise one. Core diagnosis: the infra layer is solid and deterministic, but the entire knowledge-quality layer (session-guidance, the soul-memory skill, tagging/routing rules) is advisory prose the model executes on best effort — nothing verifies it. The single most damaging hole: a tagless mark_publish is accepted silently by the server and becomes permanently invisible to mark_lookup, so the whole recall half rots invisibly.

Wrote the plan to /plans/plugin-knowledge-quality.md (7 items) and indexed it under Active Plans.

Item 1 implemented (pending Fritz commit): a publish tag-gate.

• hooks/publish-gate.sh — one dispatcher wired on both PreToolUse and PostToolUse for the plugin's own mark_publish (matcher mcp__.*demarkus-memory__mark_publish). Tagless publish (or importance outside [0,1]) → warn (default, PostToolUse additionalContext nudge) / block (PreToolUse deny) / ask (PreToolUse ask).
• Strictness via configured_strictness in lib.sh: env DEMARKUS_MEMORY_STRICTNESS → ~/.demarkus/plugin-memory.strictness file → warn. Kept in its own file so setup.sh conf rewrites never clobber it. Always-on check, severity-only knob (not an opt-in capability).
• tests/publish-gate_test.sh, 14 cases, all green; knowledge-join_test.sh still 11/11.
• Pins SERVER 0.17.13→0.17.14; plugin 0.3.0→0.4.0; session-guidance notes the gate.

Two correctness lessons worth keeping:

1. The python3 fallback I first wrote used python3 - <<EOF, which makes Python read the program from stdin and consume the payload — sys.stdin is then empty and the gate always fails open. Caught it because the isolated parser test returned the fail-open tuple for every case. (Then dropped python entirely — see #2.)
2. Fritz: no python, no jq, no external deps that may not be installed. Rewrote the parser as a pure-awk character-level JSON scanner (awk is already the engine behind json_escape). It tracks string boundaries (honoring \ escapes) and the object-key path, so an arbitrary body value containing literal "tags":"DECOY" and stray braces is correctly skipped — verified on stock BSD /usr/bin/awk and pinned by a decoy-body regression test.

Design decisions for later items also locked: per-project template aligns to the proven demarkus-soul structure (add debugging.md, guidelines.md, maintained per-project index.md, plans/ lifecycle); knowledge systems get a guaranteed root hub world holding the global template + policy at mark://root/.well-known/demarkus/, with the agent acting as courier to mirror declared strictness into local config the credential-less hook can read.

Pre-existing gap noted: the plugin's shell tests aren't run by any CI workflow.