LLM context hydration

The knowledge base is Meridians' contextual nervous system: it grounds a new agent so it can improve a specific job without absorbing a flat corpus or inventing a parallel architecture.

Load in passes, not all at once

1. Identify the task's decision boundary: product promise, vocabulary, runtime contract, security, operations, or a narrow subsystem.
2. For an unfamiliar or cross-cutting question, run npm run knowledge:query -- "<question>"; otherwise open the matching generated context pack, then its single maintained hub.
3. Load only the leaf or two leaves needed for the immediate decision. Follow an ownership link instead of re-explaining a neighbouring concept. In a narrow or metered viewport, --read returns the matching sections of the top page with citable line ranges before you spend a turn on the whole file.
4. When the change is already in hand, run npm run knowledge:owners to see which maintained pages anchor the code it touched, rather than guessing which doc owns the moved behaviour.
5. For a technical or behavioural claim, inspect the named code, generated reference, and canonical record; prose provides intent and route, not a competing source of truth.
6. State which sources were consulted, update the owning leaf when the contract moves, and regenerate the projections that expose it.

Boundaries that keep agents grounded

• Maintained knowledge explains concepts and points to authority under knowledge-base/knowledge/.
• Generated reference exposes exhaustive or measured projections under knowledge-base/generated/.
• Diagram source remains single-purpose under knowledge-base/diagrams/; generated diagram aggregates are never edited by hand.
• Code and the canonical record win when explanatory prose disagrees.

A context pack is intentionally small. It should make the next action better informed, not replace the agent's obligation to inspect the implementation it changes.

The compiled knowledge catalog accelerates routing with summaries, authority, status, headings, links, and code anchors. It is generated metadata, not maintained truth. Source ingestion and durable synthesis follow the LLM wiki operations contract.

The generated Knowledge Atlas is the whole-system orientation surface: corpus weight, concept co-occurrence, cross-branch links, authority, and status. It complements the hierarchical map; it does not replace task-bounded query and hydration. Term frequency and linkage are navigation signals, never measures of conceptual importance or correctness.