canon

One record for your memory bank and your personality, shared across every model and every tool.

You keep the same working relationship whether you open Claude Code, Claude CLI, ChatGPT, Codex, or a web surface: the same authored voice, the same accumulated memory, the same decisions. Today that lives in a dozen files with a dozen shapes (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, SOUL.md, GEMINI.md) plus per-tool memory stores that do not talk to each other. canon gives all of them one typed record to draw from and write back to, and renders each tool's file from that record.

What it does

• One envelope, five kinds. An authored personality block, a raw or extracted memory, a synthesized persona, a decision record, and a reference to an external research artifact all share one record shape with a provenance receipt on every entry.
• Two scopes that layer. A global block is your default everywhere; a workspace block with the same id overrides it where that workspace applies. A render resolves the effective set for its target, current entries only.
• Deterministic by construction. Ordering uses a clock-free ordinal, so a rebuild from the same records is byte-identical. The wall clock is kept only as a non-authoritative convenience.
• An assembly, not a rewrite. canon aims at proven engines rather than replacing them: a memory fact-engine, an authored-block store, and a cross-provider transport. It adds the one record they share and the renderer that projects each surface.

How one record becomes the file each tool reads

canon writes four paths and no others, and inside those four it rewrites only the span between its own markers. A file with no canon region is left alone.

How a rendered file is checked back against the record

A round-trip that loses a field passes only when the adapter declared that loss in advance. Anything else fails the gate rather than logging a warning.

What canon carries

Every count is asserted against the module that defines it in tests/test_repo_art.py.

Status

F0 is the record of record: the canonical schema, its validator, and the per-scope layering. F1 adds the storage seam: a MemoryBackend protocol with capability tokens and four adapters, among them a zero-drop SQLite reference and injected-handle adapters for a memory fact-engine and an authored-block store. R0 adds the block round-trip gate: a byte-exact region boundary inside a managed file, a record-to-text renderer and its inverse, and a go/no-go verdict that proves a block set round-trips to its canonical form with every dropped field declared.

R1 renders your files from the record. It resolves the block set for a file's scope and rewrites only the region canon owns, every byte outside it preserved. It writes only a fixed allow-list of files, and only a file you have opted in with a canon region. Where a tool reads both a global and a workspace file, the workspace file carries just your workspace blocks, so a shared block is never duplicated; where a tool reads one file, that file carries the full resolved set.

R2 mirrors your whole record set into an Obsidian vault. Each record becomes one markdown note you can read, search, and link, and a MEMORY.md index lists them all. The full record rides inside every note, so a rebuild is exact and editing a note's prose never rewrites the record behind it. canon writes only inside its own vault, never touches a file it did not write, and when you drop a record it reports the note left behind rather than deleting it. R2 also adds SOUL.md to the rendered surfaces.

V2 through V4 add the checks and the decision on top of them. A drift check re-derives every managed surface and compares only the region canon owns, so your own prose outside the markers is never flagged. A persona check reports whether the memories behind a synthesized persona still resolve. V4 separates a mechanical fast-forward from a conflict, writes the fast-forwards, and raises a durable gate for anything a human should adjudicate.

A harness reaches all of this over MCP. canon mcp serves six read-only tools: identity, a readiness diagnostic, the authored record set, the render for a scope, the validator, and the aggregate check. Nothing on that server writes a file. Reconcile stays a library call, because rewriting your instruction files and raising a gate is an action with a person behind it.

The CLI can also compile a provider-neutral continuity capsule from two explicit inputs: records.jsonl and atoms.jsonl. Preview reports artifact names, target tier, readiness probe data, and source-state hashes without writing. Export writes the same capsule as Canon Markdown, capsule JSON, readiness JSON, or a three-file bundle. The capsule records omitted state as typed atoms or transform omissions and says what the export does not prove, including host enforcement. It does not import provider auth, private databases, ChatGPT web state, or Claude web state.

Installing a region into a fresh file, the first migrator on the version seam, and the global SOUL.md and GEMINI.md surfaces are later phases. Everything shipped is proven by a full test suite and aims at the one envelope.

Run it

Canon 0.1.0 is prepared as a GitHub release candidate. Install from a reviewed GitHub release asset after publication, or from a local wheel during review:

python -m pip install canon-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl

No PyPI package ownership or publication is claimed here.

Serve the record set to a harness:

canon mcp

Ask canon what it believes, with no transport in the way:

canon check
canon blocks

canon check exits non-zero when a wired leg fails or the block pool is not the authored set, so a build can key on it. Point it at your records with CANON_BLOCKS_DIR, and at your files with CANON_HOME and CANON_WORKSPACE.

Preview and export a continuity capsule from explicit local inputs:

canon --json preview --workspace . --records records.jsonl --atoms atoms.jsonl --target codex-cli
canon export --workspace . --records records.jsonl --atoms atoms.jsonl --target codex-cli --format canon-md
canon export --workspace . --records records.jsonl --atoms atoms.jsonl --target codex-cli --format capsule-json
canon --json export --workspace . --records records.jsonl --atoms atoms.jsonl --target codex-cli --format bundle --out bundle

The codex-cli and claude-code targets are native-advisory surfaces. App and web targets remain guided until their hosts provide stronger startup evidence. Preview and stdout exports work across supported Python platforms. Creating a new bundle currently requires Windows with the confined native writer. On Linux and macOS, new bundle creation returns unsafe_path without writing; use stdout export there. The Windows final directory rename is parent-handle-relative and leaf-only. This bounds publication, not immutability after the command returns.

Run the suite:

python -m pytest

No runtime dependencies. Python 3.11 or newer.

Layout

src/canon/
  schema.py, validator.py, layering.py   the record, its rules, per-scope resolve
  backends/                              the storage seam and four adapters
  region.py, textblock.py, fidelity.py   the byte boundary, the text codec, the gate
  surface.py, registry.py                the render composition, the write allow-list
  frontmatter.py, vault.py               the note frontmatter codec, the one-record note
  vault_mirror.py, vault_fidelity.py     the whole-vault mirror and its round-trip gate
  drift.py, writing_gate.py              the surface drift check, the injected prose gate
  persona_thesis.py, canon_check.py      the persona basis adapter, the aggregate check
  reconcile*.py                          the fast-forward decision and its durable gate
  blocks.py, local_mcp.py, cli.py        the authored-block loader, the MCP door, the CLI
  capsule*.py, atom.py, adapter.py       the continuity capsule, atom and target contract
  cli_compile.py, cli_export.py          preview, stdout export and bundle export
  cli_artifacts.py, cli_publish.py       source hashes and confined artifact publishing
tests/                                   round-trip, validator, layering, backend,
                                         fidelity, surface, orchestration, vault,
                                         drift, reconcile, continuity, and artwork proofs
docs/art/                                the drawings above and the spec they render from
project-docs/                            the F0, F1, R0, R1, R2, V2, V3, V4, MCP decisions

See project-docs/ for the schema reference, the layering derivation, the section-ownership contract, the declared drops each storage backend must announce, and the decisions behind the round-trip, vault, drift and reconcile gates.

License

FSL-1.1-MIT. Functional Source License, source-available now for any purpose other than a competing product, and it converts to the MIT license two years after each version is released. See LICENSE.