Fable Brain

Frontmatter Dialect Decision

4 min read

Frontmatter Dialect Decision

Every note in this vault uses one merged frontmatter dialect, the claude-obsidian status vocabulary plus house enrichment fields for provenance and confidence, exactly as codified in CONVENTIONS.

What it is

  • A decision record ratifying the YAML frontmatter contract for every wiki page in the Fable 5 Brain.
  • The dialect merges two ingredient sets instead of inventing a third:
    • Base keys from the claude-obsidian wiki skill: type, title, status, created, updated, and tags with a note/<type> mirror tag.
    • House enrichment keys for this research vault: domain, confidence, related, source_urls, sources, and the mutation trio approval_status, risk_level, rollback_note.
  • The status vocabulary stays seed, developing, mature, evergreen, unchanged from the claude-obsidian dialect, so existing plugin tooling keeps working.
  • The master copy of the contract lives in wiki/meta/CONVENTIONS.md; CLAUDE.md carries only a summary and is restored from the master if an upgrade clobbers it.

How it works

  • type is one of: source, entity, concept, flow, platform, account, decision, deliverable, question, gap, experiment, comparison, meta.
  • domain is one of eight fixed values: model-and-family, claude-ai-harness, claude-code-harness, tools-and-skills, memory-and-context, communication-rules, safety-and-permissions, best-practices.
  • confidence follows Confidence Tag Policy: evidence-based, practitioner, or contested at note level, with per-claim tags in the body.
  • YAML stays flat: ISO dates, lists as - item, wikilinks quoted, no nested maps.
  • related carries at least 6 quoted wikilinks; this brain’s authoring runs target 8 or more.
  • source_urls entries carry a retrieval date suffix so staleness checks have something to bite on.
  • sources lists [[System Prompt Export 2026-07]] only when a note uses corpus claims, which keeps corpus provenance queryable.
  • approval_status, risk_level, and rollback_note appear only on decision and flow notes that recommend mutations, like this one.
  • updated is bumped on every edit; the lint and audit gates read all of these fields mechanically.

Best practice

  • Keep the master contract in CONVENTIONS and treat CLAUDE.md as a replaceable summary layer; restore from the master after any generator upgrade. PRACTITIONER
  • Keep the agent-facing summary short; official Claude Code guidance warns “Bloated CLAUDE.md files cause Claude to ignore your actual instructions!” (https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices). EVIDENCE-BASED
  • Mirror the official sizing guidance, “target under 200 lines per CLAUDE.md file”, when projecting this contract into the agent layer (https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory). EVIDENCE-BASED
  • Quote every wikilink inside YAML lists so Obsidian and strict YAML parsers agree on the value. PRACTITIONER
  • Keep related at or above the floor so graph traversal never dead-ends on a leaf note. PRACTITIONER
  • Add the mutation trio only where a note recommends changing live state; inert notes stay lean. PRACTITIONER
  • Date every source_urls entry so rule 5 of Confidence Tag Policy, the staleness rule, stays checkable. PRACTITIONER

Pitfalls

  • Nested YAML maps break the flat-YAML rule and the vault linter.
  • Unquoted wikilinks in YAML lists parse as nested sequences and corrupt the field.
  • Importing a draft/final status vocabulary from other vaults; only seed, developing, mature, and evergreen are valid here.
  • Forgetting the note/<type> mirror tag, which desynchronizes tag queries from type queries.
  • Adding approval_status to concept or entity notes; the contract scopes it to mutation-recommending decisions and flows.
  • Em dashes anywhere in a note, including YAML strings; the style rule bans them vault-wide.

Sources

Next actions

  • Add a lint rule that rejects notes missing the note/<type> mirror tag.
  • Spot-check five existing notes for unquoted YAML wikilinks.
  • Revisit the related floor once the vault passes 100 notes.

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