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The Notebook

The structured state object. See the full blog post: ../../blog/the-notebook-schema.md

Definition

The notebook is a structured state object that flows between turns, between agents, and across process boundaries. It's what makes Senter (any model in the Senter family) an effective auxiliary to Hermes Agent rather than just a smaller model.

The notebook is owned by Senter, not by Hermes. Hermes is a guest who reads the relevant slice, makes a decision, and writes back. Senter does the summarization, indexing, and irrelevant-dropping.

The schema

A notebook is a directory of YAML files:

~/.senter/notebook/
├── sessions/
│   ├── s_2026-06-07_001.yaml      # session file
│   └── s_2026-06-07_001/
│       └── moments/
│           ├── m_1829.yaml         # individual moment
│           └── m_1830.yaml
├── index.yaml                     # cross-session index
└── embeddings.faiss               # vector index

Each session has: - task + task_status - context (raw_history_size + condensed_history + recent_moments) - decisions (full audit log) - pending (open threads) - escalations (Hermes handoffs) - links (cross-references) - stats (totals, sizes)

Each moment has: - Multi-modal content (text + audio_signature + image_signature + multimodal_embedding) - Audio/image paths (on-demand, for full retrieval) - Structured metadata (concepts, retrieval_keys, importance, decay_rate) - Relations (parent/child/links) - Agent actions taken

The compaction policy

Age Action
0-7 days Keep full fidelity
7-30 days Decay importance; summarize moments with importance < 0.3
30-90 days Daily → weekly summaries
90+ days Weekly → monthly; archive originals to cold storage
Never (concepts) Concept indices persist forever, detail degrades

The LLM does the summarization — Senter itself summarizes its own old moments.

The privacy model

  1. Owner-only by default — chmod 600 in ~/.senter/
  2. Per-modality opt-out — ~/.senter/config.yaml flags
  3. Manual redaction — nb.redact(moment_id), nb.forget(concept)
  4. Encrypted-at-rest — optional, off by default for performance

The 256K context

The 256K context window exists for the notebook. Raw conversations stay short; structured notebook entries get the long window. This is Stage 4 (YaRN extension) of the pipeline.

See also