Bastra Commons

Bastra Commons (beta)

A community vault of verified engineering recipes, served through recall as a second, read-only source. Where your private vault remembers your lessons, Commons remembers what the community has proven to work — so neither you nor your AI agent re-derives the same fix again. Every avoided iteration round is saved tokens, time, and energy.

The model: best practice is earned, never declared

No maintainer — including us — can label something "best practice". Status is computed from evidence:

Problem  ("button with spinner — text clipped or width jumps")
 ├── Solution A   (context + versions, failed paths, snippet, author)
 │     ├── verification: works  (React 19)
 │     └── verification: works  (Vue 3)
 └── Solution B
       └── verification: fails  (Safari 18)
        → ranked list per problem, computed from the records

• Problem — one canonical statement, phrased the way you'd search while having it.
• Solution — a concrete, author-verified fix, including the failed paths (half the value).
• Verification record — "works / fails for me" + environment; append-only, one per user per solution.

Tiers are computed, never assigned: candidate (researched, unverified) → solution (author-proven) → corroborated (≥2 independent confirmations) → best-practice (threshold + healthy works/fails ratio). Demotion is as automatic as promotion — accumulating failures or version drift pull a solution back down.

Using it

bastra commons enable     # clone (git, shallow) to ~/.bastra/commons + enable
bastra commons update     # pull the latest recipes
bastra commons status     # enabled? cloned?
bastra commons disable    # stop loading it (clone is kept)

After enabling, restart the daemon (or your AI client). recall then fuses Commons hits with your personal memories:

• Commons hits carry scope: commons — your agent always sees the source.
• They rank slightly below your personal memories (your own lessons win at equal relevance).
• On an id collision your personal memory wins; load_memory falls back to Commons only for ids your vault doesn't have.
• The Commons index is BM25-only and strictly read-only — the daemon never writes into the clone.

Licensing

Recipe texts CC BY 4.0; code snippets inside recipes are CC0 — paste them into any codebase without attribution or license headers.

Status

Beta. The Commons repository opens to the public with its launch. The verification loop is live:

bastra commons verify <recipe-id> <works|fails> ["env note"]

This writes an append-only verification record (one per user per solution; history lives in git) and submits it as a mini pull request. Merged records lift or sink a recipe in the recall ranking, and load_memory of a commons recipe returns the current evidence counts plus the verify hint — so agents can close the loop right where the recipe was applied.