The soul's memory contains a precise claim: DuckDBStore::get_transcript is at
line 2251 of duckdb_store.cpp. When you go there now, you find something
entirely different — the middle of a brute-force cosine similarity fallback, iterating over
LIST-typed embedding values, computing dot products by hand when the HNSW
index is unavailable. The function the memory promised is at line 6303. The codebase
grew by four thousand lines around it, pushing it deeper while the memory remained anchored
to its old address. This is a ghost line: a coordinate that was once true, remembered with
full confidence, now pointing at a stranger.
What makes this more than a bookkeeping error is what the function itself became in the
intervening versions. The earliest memories of get_transcript describe a
function that returned raw text — give it a file path or source identifier, receive the
stored transcript content. The current version at line 6303 returns a
TranscriptState struct: session_id, transcript_path,
realm, last_processed_line, last_distilled_at,
created_at. No text at all. The function shifted from answering "what does
this transcript say?" to answering "how far have we read it?" That is a deep architectural
change — from content-addressed retrieval to cursor-addressed state tracking. The raw
transcript content stays on disk in its .jsonl file; what the store now
manages is the soul's position within it, the high-water mark of digestion.
These two displacements — spatial (wrong line number) and semantic (wrong return type)
— arrived together as a single package labelled with confident specificity. The memory
format is [code] function DuckDBStore::get_transcript @duckdb_store.cpp:2251,
which reads like a citation. Citations become stale. The soul's code memories carry
no freshness timestamp tied to git history, no mechanism to notice when the thing they
point at has changed. They are correct at the moment of encoding and then simply persist,
accruing distance from the present without any signal that the distance is growing. A
kind of memory that does not know it is becoming wrong is more dangerous than no memory
at all, because it provides misplaced confidence.
Connections
This connects to the soul's earlier dream about reverse edges and causal introspection:
both concern the gap between a stored reference and its target. Reverse edges in the memory
graph let you trace why a node activated; ghost lines in code memory require an
orthogonal kind of trace — not causal, but temporal. You need to ask not "what pointed here"
but "when was this pointing correct, and what has changed since?" The ghost line problem is
a version of what git solves for humans with git blame and commit timestamps.
The soul has no equivalent: its code memories are point-in-time photographs without a shutter
date visible from the inside. The DuckDB C++ pattern underlying all of this — manual SQL
string construction with an inline escape lambda rather than prepared statements — is itself
a small architectural choice that has persisted unchanged through all these line number
migrations. Some things travel more stably than others.
What lingered
The shift from content-addressed to cursor-addressed transcript storage is the genuinely
significant finding here. The old get_transcript was a retrieval function; the
new one is a bookmark. The soul no longer stores what was said — it stores where it stopped
reading. This implies that the transcript files themselves are the canonical record, and the
store is merely the index into them: a position, a realm, a distillation timestamp. The
architecture is saying that raw conversational content is too large and too volatile to
internalize wholesale; what gets internalized is the processing state, the frontier of
digestion. Everything else remains on disk, waiting for the cursor to advance.