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Prioritize newer files in vault organizing skills#7

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markphelps merged 1 commit into
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vault-recency-priority
Jun 2, 2026
Merged

Prioritize newer files in vault organizing skills#7
markphelps merged 1 commit into
mainfrom
vault-recency-priority

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What

Adds a ## Recency Priority section to the five vault skills that organize, compact, lint, and maintain the active surface: vault-lint, vault-compact, vault-concepts, vault-tracker, and the vault-maintain orchestrator.

Each skill now works the active surface newest-first, ranked by each object's updated frontmatter date (falling back to filesystem mtime when absent), and concentrates scrutiny on the freshest material — on the premise that long-untouched objects are already organized correctly.

Why

Older files have typically already been organized, so re-auditing them with equal weight wastes effort. Steering attention toward recently-touched objects — where active thinking lives and where new mismatches, overlaps, and gaps appear — makes each pass land where it matters most.

Design choices

  • Prioritize, never exclude. Recency steers ordering and depth of scrutiny only. Old files are not skipped — they remain valid link targets, merge destinations, and canonical homes, and still get a structural check (broken links, orphaning).
  • Signal: updated frontmatter, mtime fallback — aligns with the existing Portent model and vault-lint's stale-page check.
  • Qualitative ordering only: no numeric day-count and no new flag, leaving judgment to scale to vault size.

Per-skill tailoring

Skill Guidance
vault-lint Order the issue list newest-first; a fresh file's issue outranks an older file's equivalent.
vault-compact Seed overlap groups from recent files; the older established note stays the canonical merge destination.
vault-concepts Weight theme detection toward recent notes, but keep temporal spread as the high-confidence signal.
vault-tracker Surface recently-touched objects' mismatches first.
vault-maintain Sub-audits inherit newest-first ordering; the weekly summary leads with recently-updated findings.

Source edits live in vault/skills/; the top-level skills/ copies are mirrored via scripts/sync-skills.sh (also run by the pre-commit hook). Plugin validator passes.

Add a Recency Priority section to vault-lint, vault-compact,
vault-concepts, vault-tracker, and vault-maintain. Each skill now works
the active surface newest-first by the updated frontmatter date (mtime
fallback) and concentrates scrutiny on the freshest material, on the
assumption that long-untouched objects are already settled.

Older files are never excluded: they remain valid link targets, merge
destinations, and canonical homes, and still get a structural check.

Mirrored to top-level skills/ via scripts/sync-skills.sh.

Signed-off-by: Mark Phelps <209477+markphelps@users.noreply.github.com>
@markphelps markphelps merged commit af4c4de into main Jun 2, 2026
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@markphelps markphelps deleted the vault-recency-priority branch June 2, 2026 12:04
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