Ideas.md, at the vault root, is a list the dreaming binary rebuilds every night over the idea cards in personal/ideas/. Everything from the top of the file through your own end marker is yours, copied into every rebuild byte for byte; below it, the list is entirely the night's — one heading per group your cards carry, one line per idea, and the dismissed ones set apart. You never edit the list directly. You edit the cards, and the list follows.

1. Adopt Ideas.md once. Skip this step if it already carries a <!-- ideas:intro:start --> marker — check with agentmdream ideas, below. Otherwise, write the introduction you want to keep — just the preamble text, not a title (# Ideas is added for you) and not the list — to a file, then preview before committing to it:

   agentmdream ideas -intro my-ideas-intro.md

   This prints the whole rendering — your introduction between the markers, the current list below it — and writes nothing. Read it. When it looks right, make the write:

   agentmdream ideas -intro my-ideas-intro.md -write

   This is the one deliberate replacement of a hand-kept Ideas.md. From here, the markers are your standing permission for the nightly rebuild, and deleting either one withdraws it — the file goes back to untouched until you adopt it again.

2. Add an idea. Either path lands it the same way:

   • From a chat surface's inbox card: python3 harness/skills/memory/scripts/inbox_review.py --file <name> --type idea --area <group> (see Drop a card in the inbox) — --type is optional when the card already carries type: idea.
   • Directly: create personal/ideas/<slug>.md yourself, with at least title, type: idea, and area: <group> in its frontmatter.

   <group> is one lower-case word, hyphens allowed — it becomes the card's area: and the heading it lands under.

3. Regroup an idea. Edit area: on its card by hand. There's no separate registry of groups to update — the heading in Ideas.md is generated from whatever values the cards carry, so renaming or merging a group is this one edit, repeated per card it applies to.

4. Retire an idea. Add dismissed: YYYY-MM-DD to its card. Nothing deletes it — the card stays on disk in personal/ideas/, and reappears on the live list the moment you remove the date.

5. See the change land. The nightly agentmdream run -apply rebuilds Ideas.md as one of its jobs, right alongside the maps. To see it sooner:

   agentmdream ideas -write

   A rebuild over a folder that hasn't changed since the last one writes nothing — running it again is harmless.

• It enriches it. An idea card joins the same nightly pass as any other card, in its own turn, and may add a summary, tags, related links, importance_proposed, and — on a deep pass — its own dated section under ## Added by dreaming.
• It never re-grades it. status, filing_confidence, title and type stay exactly what the card carries. The card never sinks to dormant, whatever the pass thinks of it.
• It never gives the card a lifecycle. personal/ has no aging axis, and an idea card is the one kind of card that gets no default lifecycle written onto it either.
• It never renames the card. The filename you gave it is the one Ideas.md links by.

Full mechanism: Memory daemon reference § Idea cards.

• Ideas.md opens with your introduction, between the two markers, byte for byte what you gave it.
• Below the end marker, one ## <area> heading per group your cards actually carry — alphabetical, with cards carrying no area: last, under "no group yet" — each idea a line like - [[a-thought-from-the-couch|A thought from the couch]] — <summary>.
• A dismissed idea sits inside one collapsed > [!note]- Dismissed (N) callout at the end, not under its old heading.
• agentmdream ideas (no flags) prints the rendering it would write next, and, on stderr, a line naming the card and group counts and whether a rebuild would change anything.

• Ideas.md never changes, however many ideas I file. It probably isn't adopted yet. agentmdream ideas (no flags) says nothing to render — Ideas.md carries no markers, so it has not been adopted and is not written when that's why — go back to step 1.
• An idea I filed isn't on the list. Confirm the card sits directly inside personal/ideas/ — a subfolder is never read — and check its area:. A card with no area: still appears, under "no group yet", never silently dropped; if it's missing entirely, confirm the card's filename ends in .md and doesn't start with a dot.
• I edited Ideas.md by hand below the end marker, and it came back. That's the rebuild working as designed, not a bug — everything below the marker is regenerated from the cards whenever the folder changes. Make the edit on the card instead: retitle, regroup, or dismiss it there.
• A dismissed idea is back on the live list. Its card lost its dismissed: field. Enrichment always carries the field forward; a hand edit that rewrote the card's frontmatter from scratch is the likelier cause. Re-add the date.

• Drop a card in the inbox — filing an idea from a chat surface.
• Memory daemon reference — the generator's mechanics and the stamp posture that keeps the night from re-grading a card.
• Find your way around the vault — where personal/ideas/ sits in the layout.
• AgentM Vault design — the ruling this page follows.