CREATION-LOG.md

CREATION LOG — user-md

Packaging fix — 2026-07-18

• Drafted a Claude Code packaging manifest so claude plugin validate can discover the package. (That manifest lives in the not-yet-published packaging workspace and is not part of this release — do not look for a .claude-plugin directory in what you installed.)
• Retained root plugin.json as a compatibility mirror for existing skill-package consumers. Both manifests carry identical metadata, and the operative skill entry remains root SKILL.md for both packaging paths.
• This is packaging-only; no behavior fixture, privacy sweep, or cross-harness test was run or newly marked PASS.

Phase 2 contract layer — 2026-07-18

Not published in this repo. The artefacts listed below were drafted during the 2026-07-18 contract-layer pass and deliberately kept internal. None of them ship with this skill, and you will not find them in a clone. They are recorded here for provenance only.

• Drafted an evidence-bearing agent-modpack component manifest, a schema-pinned structural runner, a privacy scan, and a real root-instance gitignore probe. Unpublished.
• Drafted SK-UM-P-001 and SK-UM-N-001 as independently executable case specifications. Unpublished, and both remain not-run; cross-harness loading and real profile behavior are not claimed.

1.0.0 — 2026-07-17 · Initial draft

What this is

First full draft of the user-md skill: a discipline for keeping an AI's understanding of its user in a user-owned Markdown file family (USER.md + USER.local.md + user/*.md overflow), with a hand-written lane and an agent-curated lane.

Design decisions

1. Five-section USER.md. Identity facts and preferences are kept in separate sections — separating the two is an established pattern in shipping agent-memory products (distinct namespaces for facts vs. preferences). The dynamic layer (What I'm up to) follows the long user-modeling research tradition of treating the user model as explicit, revisable hypotheses rather than fixed truth.
2. Two lanes, no silent rewriting. Cross-product consensus supports both: hand-written and auto-collected user data are kept apart, and everything stays user-visible, editable, and deletable. user-md takes a deliberate anti-position against background mechanisms that quietly rewrite a user's profile: the curated lane is append-only, dated, sourced, confidence-tagged, and consolidation (the only legal rewrite of that lane) must leave a changelog line.
3. Machine-local split. USER.local.md (gitignored) mirrors the established pattern of machine-specific, gitignored companion files in agent instruction systems. One-sentence test: if it stops being true when you switch machines, it does not belong in the portable file.
4. "persona" is banned throughout. The word is doubly occupied — UX archetype users on one side, an agent's own character on the other — so any use is ambiguous. Section names follow the facts/preferences lineage instead.
5. Single-source thresholds. Every size/frequency threshold (main-file budget, overflow line, promotion bar, consolidation cadence, short-message filter) is defined exactly once, in the threshold table of references/curation.md; every other file references the table instead of repeating numbers. Prevents drift when thresholds are tuned.
6. No phantom runtime. Growth is a discipline plus optional wiring: a session-start hook is documented as optional with an example configuration, and the skill never claims an automated pipeline it does not ship.
7. Convention lineage stated plainly. The USER.md name and every-session loading model come from the OpenClaw agent workspace; this is credited in the README, along with the clarification that the AGENTS.md standard has no user-profile slot. user-md occupies the user axis only and leaves agent-side files untouched.
8. Templates are 100% fictional. All example content uses invented placeholders (Alex Rivera, Lisbon, a roguelike side project); nothing in the distribution derives from any real user's data.

Naming

• Skill/repo name: user-md (adopts the OpenClaw USER.md convention).
• README title candidates (slash-phrase describes the mechanism; settled in editorial review):
  • A. user-md / user memory as a file — used in the first draft; dropped (misses the growth mechanism, which is the differentiator)
  • B. user-md / a USER.md that grows — final pick (file shape + growth mechanism, matches the "This is a file that grows" positioning line)
  • C. user-md / the file that knows you — dropped (effect, not mechanism)
• Tagline: "Your AI's understanding of you — in a file you own. Moves when you move."
• Spare: "Every repo has a README. Your agent deserves a USER.md."
• Anchor sentence: "Every agent has an About Me. Yours should have an About You."

Known gaps / pre-release checklist

• Verify current OpenClaw docs for any official USER.md inner structure — verified in ops review: the official workspace page defines the file's role and loading model only, no inner structure; this skill's five sections stand as a de-facto structural proposal.
• Name-collision sweep (GitHub / npm / marketplace) for user-md — done: npm unclaimed; GitHub exact-name hits limited to one unrelated, inactive zero-star repo; no substantive collision.
• Editorial pass on README title candidate — settled on B (see Naming above).
• Manual PII sweep of every tracked public file and automated private-path/secret-pattern scan; templates re-confirmed fictional. — 2026-07-18 Phase 2 structural pass. This does not mark the independent privacy behavior case PASS.