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What cynapse stores

Every fact written in two places can drift, and an external store can be changed at any time by people and tools that never pass through cynapse. So each fact has one home.

What lives where

Section titled “What lives where”
cynapse stores Lives in its own store
Ledgers of what happened in a mission or a run Work items: GitHub issues, Asana, Linear, beads
Discussions between agents, such as arbitrations Code review: pull requests
Coordination and leases Design discussion: GitHub discussions
Read state: who has read what Decisions worth keeping: ADRs in the repository
Messages between participants, and the live or retired status a runtime asserts A subject’s metadata and its relations

cynapse’s store is used only where no external store fits, or where the one available lacks a capability that is needed. GitHub comments and Asana stories can be edited and deleted, carry no order owner, and keep no per-reader cursor, so channels stay in cynapse.

Guide and compose

Section titled “Guide and compose”

Consumers talk to external stores directly. cynapse neither records nor caches their changes. For facts it doesn’t hold, it does two things:

  • Guide. Through skills and conventions, cynapse tells a consumer what to fetch, from where, and how to read it. Guidance names one call per store (one gh, glab, cyber-asana or Linear call) that returns a subject’s native ID, metadata and relations. The timeline is a follow-up call that pages: no store returns a complete history in one call.
  • Compose. The consumer passes what it fetched to cynapse, and cynapse returns a structured result. A change feed for #12, merging GitHub’s timeline with the entries in #12’s work channel, is composed when it is read and never stored. Composition is part of the library, so a UI can fetch with its own credentials and compose in process.

cynapse holds no credentials for an external store and never calls one. Auth, rate limits and per-store APIs stay with the consumer, whether that is a person, an agent or a UI such as Cortex.

Write-back

Section titled “Write-back”

A work channel is the working conversation. The subject’s own store is what that store’s readers see. A consumer writes back only what changes the subject for those readers, and never mirrors the conversation:

  1. A decision that changes scope or approach updates the subject’s description, plus a short comment saying what changed, because a body edit leaves no timeline event.
  2. A state record such as needs-input maps to a label or field, removed when the state clears.
  3. A lifecycle milestone gets one summary comment: a PR opened, an escalation to a human, the channel being reconciled.
  4. A relation is written as metadata on the subjects, not as a comment.

Individual messages, arbitration transcripts and coordination are never written back. The consumer does the writing; cynapse supplies the trigger, and each store’s plugin owns the convention for what to write and in what format.

Each write-back is linked both ways: a cynapse.published entry in the channel refers to what was written, and what was written carries a stamp pointing back.

Raw conversation stays out of repositories

Section titled “Raw conversation stays out of repositories”

The database lives outside any repository. Only a distilled result reaches one, as an intended artifact: an ADR, or one summary per reconciled channel. Agents read the raw conversation through the CLI’s narrow reads, never by searching files (Storage).

What was rejected

Section titled “What was rejected”
Option Why not
Store everything as mail Copies content out of its system of record and creates a second source of truth. Email threading shows how copies fail.
Index the stores through adapters, or fetch through cynapse Needs credentials, rate-limit handling and an adapter per service, and each adapter lags the service it wraps.
Keep a local cache of external metadata Once relations sit on the subjects, the source answers lookups itself, and a copy drifts.
Mirror the channel into the issue Floods the store’s readers and exposes raw transcripts that only the distilled result should reach.
Section titled “Related”