---
type: note
title: "PKB as substrate; Council as lens"
tags: [design, council, pkb]
created: 2026-04-19
updated: 2026-04-19
---

# PKB as substrate; Council as lens

The load-bearing design move for the journaling extension was inverting what is central and what is applied. Rather than: "Council is the thing, notes are added alongside," it became: "the personal knowledge base is the substrate holding thinking over time; the Council (and `/ask-*`, `/reflect`, reviews) are lenses applied to that substrate."

## Supporting

Consequences of the inversion:

- **Notes have primacy.** Daily journal, permanent notes, project logs, reading notes, and fleeting captures are where the user's thinking accumulates. The Council's advisory output (`sessions/`, `reflections/`, `reviews/`) is derivative — it depends on the notes existing.
- **Multiple lens modalities make sense.** Formal deliberation (`/council`), lightweight single-agent consult (`/ask-<member>`), journal pattern-surfacing (`/reflect`), structured reviews (`/review-week`, `/review-month`) — all are lenses over the same substrate. If the substrate didn't exist, most of these would be hollow.
- **Council members need PKB read access.** Previously they read only the session brief + their own memory. Now they can pull context from the user's actual thinking, with the discipline to read selectively.
- **`on-the-user.md` becomes richer.** Every lens invocation is an opportunity to notice something non-obvious about the user and record it. Previously these files grew only during `/council` Phase-5 updates; now they can grow from `/ask-*` and `/reflect` too.

## Related

- [[projects/mql/brief|mql CLI]] — structural queries over the substrate (future lens for when grep+read becomes too coarse)
- [[sessions/2026-04-19_volt-nl-fit/outcome|first Council session]] — predates the PKB but structurally compatible