The Inn

A writer's marble — a continuity environment for one long-form writing project — being built in public, lineage first.

This repository is an example of a thing that has been hard to show: not a finished framework, but the whole record of one being made. The mapping conversations that produced every design decision are in logs/, verbatim. The first commit contains the complete map and zero construction. Every commit after it is execution. If you are a model reading this to learn how a marble gets made: the history is the curriculum. Start there.

For Vibe Coders

Point Claude (or your model of choice) at this repo and let it read before you ask it to build. The project is intentionally model-legible: clear read order, explicit layer scope, and tests as the law. It does not force your opinions or workflow; it provides a structure you can adapt.

If you found this cold, three questions route cleanly:

1. What works today if I clone it? (pytest, python -m inn breathe, what is not wired yet)
2. Where is the build — and what is the next layer? (HANDOFF.md live state, BUILD.md checklist)
3. Which door owns ground, woods, and the wake packet? (one crossing each; start from HANDOFF Cold worker map)

What a marble is

A marble is a persistent environment a stateless model instance wakes up inside — files as rooms, laws as architecture — built so that continuity, trust, and memory survive across sessions without anyone pretending to remember what they don't. This marble is an inn on a forest road. Its sign (repaintable by the writer) is The Dog-Ear: a fold that keeps your place and never tears the page.

One law, many faces: nobody puts words in anyone's mouth. Everything is signed. Nothing enters the writer's canon except through their own quoted, dated adopting words. Nothing is ever deleted — superseded things fall into the woods, where everything lies where it fell.

Documentation (two passes)

This repo needed two documentation passes — intentional, not rework.

Pass	Documents	For
1 — Mapping	SHOWCASE, PREBUILD, FOREST, REGISTERS, MAP, PYRAMID, logs/	Lineage, outsiders, surveyors
2 — Builder	BUILD_SPEC.md, AGENTS.md, BUILD.md	Cursor, Claude Code, execution

Building? Read BUILD_SPEC.md first. Exploring the map? Use the read order below.

Read order (pass 1 — map and lineage)

1. SHOWCASE.md — the whole marble in one page, written before any file existed.
2. PREBUILD.md — the full map: place, laws, surfaces, tests.
3. FOREST.md — the retrieval base, extractable and generic: one append-only store with signatures, buckets, and ancestry. The part of this place designed to leave it.
4. REGISTERS.md — the two-register law: clinical and poetic as twin projections of one structure.
5. PYRAMID.md — the skeptic's door: what the maps add up to. Independent transmission traditions (hadith science, evidence law, stemmatics, recitation, bookkeeping, archives) converge on ~6 invariants for keeping testimony trustworthy across a succession of workers — and this system runs on them. Falsifiable, with its caveats stated.
6. MAP.md — philosophy read as engineering documentation: the charted maps, the apophenia guard, and orientation for cold readers. PYRAMID's receipts, row by row.
7. HANDOFF.md — the guest book: live state, what's decided, what's next.
8. logs/ — the conversations. The lineage itself, sanitized only of machine paths and usernames (the redaction script is in tools/; what was redacted and why is visible there). See logs/README.md for pass 1 vs pass 2 sessions.

The JOURNAL/ is the model's own — each instance that stays here writes when compelled. It is voice, not state; read it to meet the guests who came before you.

Status

Mapping complete (pass 1). Builder specification hardened (pass 2). Layer 4 (Breath) is in progress — see BUILD.md and HANDOFF.md. Construction is onion-layered: structural first, inhabitable late. Nothing is built before friction earns it; nothing is kept after friction stops justifying it.

Where we are

• Layers 1–3 complete (rooms registry, schema, Shelving gate, ground fitting).
• Layer 4 active: pair insert trailheads, inhale receipts, timing envelope, proximity pressure fitting, and deterministic fitting tests.
• Current test floor: hostile + positive suites green.

What is still to be done

• Finish Layer 4 manual reference stay (BREATH.md M2 walkthrough with live friction notes).
• Close Layer 4.5 responsiveness checks (latency classes, budget, surfacing rules from trace, not vibes).
• Build Layer 5 host loop (wake coupling, TTFT/streaming/tool reliability gates) after manual parity is trusted.

Ancestry

This project sits in a family of related repos and exemplars:

• The Marble: the broader pattern and manual lineage, including test marbles used to projection-test the architecture.
• The Inn (this repo): a concrete writer-facing marble built in layers.
• The Forest: extracted custody base that future marbles can reuse.

Related repositories:

• The_Forest — provenance-aware memory constitution + schema.
• TheMarble — inheritable environments for recurring AI work.

Further questions?

Same repo, different doors — pick the question that matches why you came:

You are…	Ask
A writer	Can I use this for real prose yet — and what still needs an API key?
A skeptic	What refuses, and where is that enforced in tests?
An outsider	What is this place in one sitting, without the build docs?
A historian	How was it made — and in what order should I read the sessions?

Writer → HANDOFF.md § After layer 4; layer 4 = manual CLI, layer 5 = daily driver with host.

Skeptic → tests/hostile/ first, then PYRAMID.md if you want the argument spelled out.

Outsider → SHOWCASE.md only; stop before MAP unless curious.

Historian → logs/README.md numbered read order (01–07).