Coherence Stack

This directory holds the stack of notes and the index that orders them.

The stack

The notes here form a stack. The top of the stack is the most authoritative note. When two notes conflict, the one higher in the stack wins. Older notes aren't deleted — they're preserved as a record of how the thinking got here — but newer notes supersede them on any point of conflict.

How order is defined

Stack order lives in one file: coherence stack.md. This is an Obsidian-style outline that lists the notes in order via wikilinks.

Example:

- [[coherence stack]]
	- [[nature-humans-tech]]
	- [[Ten precepts (Taoism)]]
	- [[Ten principles for good design]]
	- [[Toyota Production System]]
	- [[Ten Precepts (Taiichi Ohno)]]

First child link = top of the stack (most authoritative). Last child link = bottom of the stack. The top-level [[coherence stack]] bullet is just the label; it isn't itself a note.

Each wikilink resolves to a sibling .md file in this directory. [[nature-humans-tech]] → nature-humans-tech.md. Wikilinks can contain spaces, parentheses, and punctuation — just append .md to the link text to get the filename.

Adding a note

1. Create the note as a .md file in this directory (e.g. my-new-principle.md).
2. Open coherence stack.md and add - [[my-new-principle]] at the position in the list that reflects its priority. Top of the list is the most authoritative position.

To reorder, just move the line in coherence stack.md. No renaming needed.

What goes in a note

Anything that would help Claude — or a future collaborator — understand how you think. Some prompts from The Coherence Premium that tend to produce useful notes:

• What problem do I solve, and for whom specifically?
• What's my actual thesis for why my approach works?
• What are the core tradeoffs I've chosen?
• What do I explicitly not do?
• How do I sound? (Include a short example that exemplifies the voice, and one that doesn't.)
• What decision did I just make, and why?

Keep each note short enough to fit comfortably in context alongside the others. Compression without loss of generative power is the goal.

What the skill ignores

• README.md — this file. Scaffolding, not a note.
• coherence stack.md — the index itself. Its wikilinks are the stack; its body is not a note.

Unlisted files become the tail of the stack

Any other .md file in this directory that isn't named in coherence stack.md still counts as a note — it just sits below the named list, unordered among other unlisted files. Named notes always override tail notes. This means you can drop a new note into the directory without editing the index right away; it joins the stack at the bottom, and you can promote it into the named list later when you know where it belongs.

If two tail files conflict on a point, the skill surfaces the tension rather than picking one — tail files have no priority relationship with each other.

If a wikilink points to a missing file

The skill will flag it rather than silently skip. Either create the file or remove the link.

Syncing from Logseq

If your notes live in Logseq, run:

./sync.sh

This copies coherence stack.md and all files it references from ~/Documents/Logseq/Documents/pages/ into the notes directory. Edit SRC in the script if your Logseq pages live elsewhere.

Creating a zip for Claude Desktop

cd .claude/skills/coherence-stack && zip -r ../../../coherence-stack.zip . && cd ../../..

Creates coherence-stack.zip in the project root, ready to upload.