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Basalt

Drift (Hg)

Element: Mercury (Hg · 80) · the only metal liquid at room temperature.

v1.1.0 — auto-audit. Run basalt audit --drift-v1 to re-evaluate previously surfaced Drift findings against the current 30-day window. Each finding is tagged with confirmed / softened / reversed / vanished. No LLM involved — purely numerical.

What it does

Detects projects whose semantic center moved over their lifespan. The classic case: a “build log” folder that quietly became a journal.

Algorithm sketch

  1. Group notes by detected project path (and daily-note regex)
  2. For each project, build a time-windowed embedding centroid trajectory
  3. Compute the angle between the first window’s centroid and the last
  4. Surface projects where the angle exceeds the drift threshold

Project detection

Projects are detected by:

  • projects/<name>/ path prefix
  • Folder containing an index.md or README.md
  • Daily-note pattern: YYYY-MM-DD.md files under a single folder

You can override detection in .basalt/config.toml:

[projects]
roots = ["projects", "work/active"]
exclude = ["projects/archived"]

Confidence

Drift confidence is the cosine angle normalized to [0, 1]. Anything > 0.6 is worth a look. Anything > 0.85 is a project that has fundamentally changed shape.