An interactive explainer — three stores, one index, a compiled wiki. Updated 2026-05-24 (post-v5). Tap the cards, rungs, and buttons below — they react.
Everything Elmar captures and everything Lucienne needs to remember lives as markdown files in the PKA repo, gets indexed into one searchable graph (vault.db), and the high-value bits are compiled by AI into a browsable wiki. "Vault" is how Lucienne behaves and remembers; "SecondBrain" is Elmar's projects and life.
"Vault" is overloaded. There are three distinct stores plus a derived cache. Tap a card to see what's inside and what it's for:
Until May 2026 thousands of converted source markdowns lived inside the Obsidian vault. That bloated it (~160 MB) and stalled mobile Obsidian on indexing.
5,000+ derived markdowns in SecondBrain/sources/ — bloating the vault, syncing to the phone, mixing machine cache with Elmar's own notes.
Sources moved to ~/PKA/data/sources/ — out of Obsidian, gitignored, still fully indexed via the data scan root. Obsidian dropped 160 MB → ~4 MB.
pka_paths.resolve_source_path(). The vault is now just the brain (wiki + notes); data/ is the cache.SecondBrain is a Karpathy-style LLM wiki: capture once, index into a graph, compile into synthesized pages.
The hard work happens at ingest time — so queries are fast, because the synthesis already exists. That's the difference from plain RAG, which re-discovers everything on every query.
index.py (schema v4) scans four roots into the single vault.db. Markdown is source of truth; the DB rebuilds in seconds.
| Root | Path | What's there |
|---|---|---|
pka | PKA/ | Memory, tasks, notes, projects, CLAUDE.md, team briefs, and reports/ (commissioned analysis). |
personal | ~/.claude/vault/ | Identity, contacts, entities, preferences, work, infrastructure (secrets excluded). |
secondbrain | SecondBrain/ | Meetings, ideas, docs, recipes, and the compiled wiki/. |
data v5 | ~/PKA/data/ | Out-of-vault source cache. Keeps moved sources indexed without bloating Obsidian. |
[[ ]] isn't mistaken for a link) → FTS + tags. Rebuild from scratch any time: python index.py --rebuild.CLAUDE.md Rule 15. Start at the top, stop when you have the answer. Tap each rung for when to use it.
You only ever do two things: record meetings and handle email normally. Everything downstream is automatic.
data/sources/<type>/ (or SecondBrain notes for meetings)index.py rebuilds vault.db → searchable| Channel | Where / when | Lands in |
|---|---|---|
| Exco sync | Mac LaunchAgent, daily 10:00 SAST | data/sources/exco/ |
| Sources-sync (watched folders) | Mac LaunchAgent, daily 10:15 SAST | data/sources/<watch>/ |
| Email sync | Luci, daily 7am SAST | email.db + OneDrive |
| "ingest this" / Team Inbox | on demand | converted, indexed |
| Meeting recorded | overnight | SecondBrain note → index.py |
You almost never pick a folder. Tap what you're trying to do — see where it goes and whether it stays searchable:
Drop files for the team to process. Lucienne triages whatever lands here.
Finished work for you to read — reports, research, handoffs. Don't dump scratch here.
| Don't touch | Why | Edit instead |
|---|---|---|
data/sources/** | Machine-converted copies, rebuilt from the originals | the original in Dropbox / GDrive |
vault.db · graphify-out/ | Generated indexes — rebuilt from markdown | nothing — they regenerate |
A wiki page above its MANUAL OVERRIDES line | Auto-compiled, overwritten on recompile | only below the marker |
_archived/ · _deleted_/ | Historical snapshots | nothing — leave as history |
SecondBrain/ — ideas/, inbox/, Scratchpad/, docs/, your notes — is yours to write freely.compile.py + compile_priorities.py (Tue 12:00) + compile_board_brief.py (Tue 12:30), Mac-side. Each writes a synthesized page with a sources_hash for staleness detection.
wiki/projects/_registry.yaml — Elmar-owned. status · flavor · seeds · parent. Seeds run as FTS queries so a project finds its sources even when filenames don't contain the project name.
vault.db + data/ cache (both gitignored, rebuilt locally). Search is local and fast; the truth is the shared markdown.reports/memory-architecture.html.wiki/vault.md, wiki/secondbrain-how-it-works.md, wiki/memory-system.md.