Claude can now write docx or pdf files to Aaron's Nextcloud Drafts/ when he
asks for a document (bio, cover letter, statement, CV section) rather than
chat text. Pandoc handles markdown -> docx and markdown -> pdf with the
xelatex engine. Upload is a WebDAV PUT against the same Nextcloud instance
dream.py already uses; NEXTCLOUD_URL / NEXTCLOUD_USER / NEXTCLOUD_PASSWORD
in .env are reused. MKCOL ensures Drafts/ exists; PROPFIND-based collision
check appends _2, _3, ... until unique. Filename sanitization strips path
components and unsafe characters.
System prompt instructs Claude to call save_document when the user wants a
file (not chat text) and not to duplicate the file contents in the chat
response — just write the file and tell Aaron where it landed.
ingest.py and watcher.py now skip files under Drafts/ at ingest time so
generated drafts don't pollute future retrieval. Drafts can still be opened,
edited, and shipped; they just don't become part of the searchable corpus
unless Aaron explicitly moves them out of Drafts/.
extract_blocks(filepath) is the new structured-extraction entry point, returning
list[{heading, text, kind}]. chunk_and_embed accepts either str (blind-chunk
back-compat) or list[dict] (one chunk per block, blind-split if oversize, heading
prepended for retrieval context and stored in metadata).
- pptx: one block per slide. Slide title becomes block heading; speaker notes
fold into the body. Image-only decks with title-only slides now produce
heading-only chunks instead of being recorded as extraction failures.
- docx: deliberately single-block (back-compat). Heading-style section detection
was implemented and rolled back: hand-formatted CVs are Normal-styled with
bold-as-heading, and tying chunk boundaries to formatting choices would lock
future-user into preserving those choices forever. Lexical + cross-encoder
retrieval already handles substring matching inside blind-chunked CVs.
- pdf/txt/md: unchanged (single block, blind chunking).
Recency tiebreak in retrieve_context: pull created_at into the SELECT, use it
as secondary sort key in _rerank so memory/journal snapshots prefer the latest
copy among near-duplicate content.
reindex_docx_pptx.py now accepts --ext=pptx,docx... so re-ingest can target a
subset; previous hardcoded delete regex would have wiped both even with a
single-ext target.
Three files in the original ingest_failures cohort have been
characterized via direct OCR and confirmed to lack ingestible text:
- Presentations/Renders.pptx — 35 PICTURE-shape renders, 33/35 zero-char
on OCR, 2 with noise (20 and 29 chars).
- Presentations/Ribbon Cutting Slideshow.pptx — 10-slide event photo
deck, 9/10 zero-char, 1 with 17 chars of noise.
- Academic/DDF555 3D Computational/GH Slicer Notes [Autosaved].pptx —
Office autosave duplicate of GH Slicer Notes.pptx; first 9 images
byte-identical (sha256) to the canonical file. 2 net-new images
contribute 36 noisy chars. Excluding to prevent double-embedding the
same content under two source filenames.
Pattern matches f18fb64 (path.parts membership). Folder-level globs
were considered and rejected: /Presentations/ contains successfully
embedded text-bearing decks (aaronnelson_3D 4D.pptx,
aaronnelson_slideslam.pptx). Exact-name + parent-folder membership
applied in both watcher filter sites (get_changed_files and
IngestHandler._should_ignore).
The fourth file in the cohort, GH Slicer Notes.pptx (the canonical
non-autosave version), was confirmed to carry 379 chars of real text
(Grasshopper UI / code samples) across 6/9 images. It remains in
ingest_failures unresolved, awaiting the eventual ocrmypdf backlog
pass.
Cleanup: 3 ingest_failures rows resolved (the excluded files).
Unresolved count: 94 → 91.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three rows in ingest_failures were Office lockfile leftovers whose
filename starts with ~� (~ followed by the UTF-8 replacement
character) instead of ~$. Somewhere in the Nextcloud sync chain the $
byte was lost or replaced; the file now lives on disk as a real file
with this corrupted name. The watcher's ("~$", ".") prefix filter
didn't match, so each cycle tried to ingest these as pptx, hit
BadZipFile inside python-pptx (lockfiles aren't real Office documents),
and they ended up permanently in ingest_failures.
Three filter sites in watcher.py applied the lockfile prefix check:
- ingest_file() at :127
- get_changed_files() at :200
- IngestHandler._should_ignore() at :290
All three now match ("~$", "~", ".") — broadened to catch any tilde
prefix, not just ~$. The cross-check against pgvector embeddings and
disk found zero legitimate tilde-prefixed files in the corpus, so the
broader filter has no false-positive risk in this corpus.
Cleanup: 3 ingest_failures rows resolved (filepath LIKE '%/~%').
Unresolved count drops 97 → 94.
If a fourth filter site is ever added, the right shape is consolidating
the lockfile prefix check to a shared function or constant. Three
parallel sites with three different tuple orderings is acceptable for
now but worth normalizing if the surface grows.
Two-sample diagnostic of the 128 ingest_failures rows surfaced two
folders whose contents are exclusively non-text PDFs (iText-produced
generative graphics from Processing sketches and computational design
sketches) and three zero-byte test artifacts. None of these have ever
produced an embedding chunk, and they have nothing extractable to
contribute. Excluding them removes 19 / 128 (15%) of the locked-out
failures from the cohort and prevents future versions of the same
patterns from re-failing.
Folder exclusions use path.parts membership rather than substring
matching — eliminates false-match risk if similarly-named folders
appear elsewhere in the corpus (e.g. an unrelated "Generative Design"
or "Computational Design 2017" directory created later). The existing
"Admin/Backups" / "Journal/Media" substring checks are looser, but
new exclusions take the tighter pattern.
Zero-byte filter goes in get_changed_files() only — the actual
ingestion gate. Adding stat() to _should_ignore() (the FS-event noise
filter) would introduce a race where the file is gone between event
fire and stat call. Empty files briefly trigger pending=True but
produce no work after debounce; cosmetic only.
Cleanup applied separately via UPDATE: 19 ingest_failures rows for
these paths marked resolved=TRUE. Unresolved-failure count: 129 -> 110.
Verified: get_changed_files() with empty state returns 1418 changed
files; all 5 excluded probes (2 folder-matched + 3 zero-byte) absent
from the result, control file present. Watcher service restarted
clean; startup scan reports no missed files.
ingest_files() updated state[path] = mtime unconditionally after every
ingest_file() call. ingest_file() returns 0 when text extraction fails,
embedding fails, no chunks are produced, or the pgvector write fails —
in every one of those cases, the path was still recorded as ingested
at the current mtime. On the next pass, get_changed_files() saw the
mtime match and skipped the file, locking it out of the corpus until
something modified it on disk.
record_ingest_failure() writes to a UI-visible failures table, but
nothing reads that table to retry. So failures accumulated silently:
the file was simultaneously logged as failed AND tracked in
watcher_state as up-to-date, and the second condition won.
Fix: only update watcher_state when ingest_file returns count > 0.
Failed ingests will be retried on the next watcher cycle until they
succeed or are explicitly excluded.
Diagnostic at fix time: 129 rows in ingest_failures, 128 currently
locked out of the corpus (filepath in watcher_state with mtime matching
current disk). 128/129 are text_extraction failures, mostly scanned
PDFs (106 .pdf, 13 .docx, 7 .pptx, 2 .md, 1 .txt). 1 source no longer
exists on disk. 0 have had their disk mtime change since failing — i.e.
without this fix, none of them would ever retry. Cross-check shows
watcher_state has 1466 paths vs. 1061 distinct sources in pgvector
embeddings, leaving a residual silent-gap of ~276 files after
accounting for failures.
Historical cleanup of files already locked out by this bug is tracked
separately. New failures from this commit forward will retry naturally.
Consolidates four extract paths and two extract-chunk-embed-write pipelines
into a single shared encoding module. Fixes the embedder lifecycle
divergence between watcher and /api/reindex (no more 200MB reload per
reindex click) and unifies failure tracking so /api/reindex failures now
surface in SettingsPanel "Ingest Health".
New files:
- scripts/encoding.py — extract_text, chunk_text, chunk_and_embed,
write_embeddings_batch
- scripts/failures.py — record_ingest_failure, resolve_ingest_failure
(shared by watcher.py and ingest.py)
Refactored:
- scripts/watcher.py — drops local extract/chunk/embed implementations
and CHUNK_SIZE/CHUNK_OVERLAP/SUPPORTED constants; imports from encoding
and failures. Now writes ingest_failures row on empty-text-extract
(was silent return 0).
- scripts/ingest.py — substantial rewrite. Exposes ingest_directory(folder,
embedder=None) for in-process invocation; CLI back-compat preserved via
ingest_folder wrapper. Module-level SentenceTransformer load removed.
- scripts/corpus_integrity.py — imports extract_text from encoding;
extract_text_for_retry function removed.
- scripts/api.py — /api/reindex rewritten with BackgroundTasks (uses
module-level embedder; no subprocess); new /api/reindex/status endpoint
reading ~/aaronai/reindex_status.json; /api/corpus/retry imports
extract_text from encoding; INGEST_SCRIPT constant removed (dead after
this refactor); 409 reentrance guard prevents double-click stomping.
Behavior changes:
- /api/reindex no longer subprocess.Popens; runs in FastAPI BackgroundTasks
threadpool, doesn't block API thread.
- /api/reindex no longer reloads SentenceTransformer on each click.
- /api/reindex failures newly write to ingest_failures (visible in
SettingsPanel "Ingest Health" — badge will jump on first reindex).
- New embeddings rows always have created_at = NOW() (canonical, server-side).
- New embeddings rows always include metadata.folder field (None when not
derivable).
- /api/reindex returns 409 on second click while a job is running.
- New /api/reindex/status endpoint for polling.
Existing 9,815 NULL created_at rows remain unchanged; backfill is a
separate decision if desired.
199 insertions, 256 deletions across 6 files (codebase shrinks net).
Found by Track 1 inventory 2026-05-02 (Finding 11 / cross-cutting F11).
Pre-commit verification: BackgroundTasks already imported, sys.path
resolves correctly via script-path semantics, static import clean.
- api.py: strip CV pinning workaround (parity violation, see architecture doc)
- dream.py: F1 — retrieve_graphiti() now accepts excluded_sources, over-fetches
3x and filters in-process. Was silently dropping the parameter; would have
confounded E3 with broken cross-stage exclusion in Graphiti arm.
- watcher.py + ingest.py: F14 — drop full_text[:50000] truncation. Was
propagating through entire cascade. Postgres TEXT can hold up to 1GB.
- corpus_integrity.py: F37 — same truncation, third path now clean.
Backups: api.py.bak.*, dream.py.bak.*, watcher.py.bak.*, ingest.py.bak.*,
corpus_integrity.py.bak.* timestamped pre-fix.
Re-cascaded Shop Class as Soulcraft (only already-cascaded source affected
by F14, 414KB).
aaron