Review of PR #103 found a real data-loss bug: parseSections only captured
text between `## ` headings. Content before the first heading — an intro
paragraph, or, if the page had no headings at all, the entire body — was
dropped on the floor, not carried into any section. Merge then had
nothing of `a` to keep there, so the fresh extraction's sections silently
became the whole output wherever that content used to be. Exactly the
failure this file exists to prevent, just re-triggered by a page shape
the parser didn't expect instead of by every re-ingest.
Fixed by treating pre-first-heading content as a section with an empty
heading. Merge's switch never matches "", so it falls through to the
same on-disk-wins default every other unlisted section already gets —
no new merge path, just no longer discarding this one's input.
Second, separate finding from the same review: mergeBullets/appendNew
deduped on the raw trimmed line, so two re-extractions of the same
logical bullet with different internal whitespace (a real possibility —
the extractor is an LLM, not a fixed serializer) produced a duplicate
instead of a no-op, undermining the idempotency this file's own doc
comments claim. Fixed by comparing a whitespace-canonicalized key
(strings.Fields + single-space join) while still emitting the original
line's text.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Compile-on-ingest, first half. buildAndWrite did an unconditional
os.WriteFile, so re-ingesting a source replaced its page wholesale and
discarded everything accumulated since — including human edits.
hyperguild#43 recorded the symptom as "re-ingest overwrites wholesale";
the framing that ingest "appends" understates it.
Now the write reads what is on disk and merges the fresh extraction into
it, asymmetrically in the existing page's favour: on-disk frontmatter and
on-disk sections win, extraction-only sections are added, bullet lists
union. An extraction can add to a note but never silently rewrite what a
human put there, which is what makes it safe on every ingest rather than
behind a review gate.
Two supporting fixes in wiki.Merge, both required for this to be safe to
run repeatedly:
- append sections (Open Questions, Updates, Evolving Notes) concatenated
wholesale, which is correct exactly once. Re-ingesting an unchanged
source would grow them every run until the page was unreadable. Now only
genuinely new lines are appended. Line-level rather than block-level,
because the common case is a re-ingest carrying one new line alongside
several it already has, and a block-level check would duplicate the old
ones every time.
- rebuildContent kept whatever blank lines a section was parsed with and
added its own, so every merge pass grew the page by a blank line —
invisible in a diff viewer, fatal to byte-stability. Section bodies are
now normalised. Re-ingesting unchanged content is byte-identical, so
brain-sync does not commit noise that hides real edits.
The drift guard that would otherwise catch repeated ingests (hashing the
source body, B3) does not exist yet, so idempotency holds here rather than
upstream.
Known limitation, deliberate: on-disk frontmatter wins, so last_updated
keeps its first-ingest date on a revised page. The alternative is this
function editing frontmatter it does not own, and no lint reads that field.
Refs hyperguild#43.
mathiasandClaude Sonnet 5