Logs & journal

Prevail’s vault is self-curating: you don’t have to remember to write things down, because every turn records itself. Two mechanisms do the work — the log and the journal.

The log (_log/)

Every chat turn appends a one-line summary to <domain>/_log/YYYY-MM-DD.md — one file per day. Over time, this becomes a literal diary of every decision you worked through, organized by domain and date.

## 2026-06-04

### (14:32) ◆ council-verdict · BLUF ● ON · 4 calls · 2.8k↑ 1.2k↓ · ~$0.02

**You:** should I sell or rent?

**Verdict:** Rent IF (a) appreciation likely, (b) landlord cost contained. Sell for migration or cap-gains harvest.

▸ disagreed: Claude (rent), Codex (sell), Antigravity (rent), Ollama (rent)

---

### (13:15) ◇ single · WIN · 3 calls · 1.5k↑ 800↓ · ~$0.01

**You:** what's my biggest financial risk?

**Claude:** Concentration in tech equity. Recommend rebalance toward broad market.

Each entry records the verdict, the framework, whether it was a council or single turn, the call count, token usage, and an estimated cost.

Integrity hashes

Alongside each YYYY-MM-DD.md sits a YYYY-MM-DD.md.shasum file recording a SHA-256 hash per entry. This lets Prevail (and you) detect if a log entry was tampered with after the fact — a small but deliberate integrity guarantee on the record of your decisions.

The journal (_journal/)

Where the log is chronological, the journal is distilled and durable. The /distill command extracts the lasting conclusions from a conversation into two files:

File	Holds
_journal/decisions.md	High-level decisions you’ve made
_journal/facts.md	Durable factual claims worth keeping

The distiller is a strict two-section parser: it only accepts text in the expected DECISION: / FACTS: shape and silently drops everything else. That’s a security measure — it prevents a model reply from injecting arbitrary content into your journal. See Security.

Searching across everything

Every turn is also written to a SQLite database under ~/.prevail/sessions/, indexed with full-text search (FTS5). From the cockpit:

/search liquidity floor      find every past chat mentioning this, any domain
/history 10                  recall your last 10 prompts in this domain

→ Slash commands

Watching it happen

/heatmap 30      activity heatmap for the last 30 days
/watch           live-monitor vault changes as turns are written

Turning it off

The Save dial in the ConfigBar controls whether a turn is logged and distilled. It’s on by default — leaving it on is what keeps the vault writing its own history. Switch it off for throwaway questions you don’t want recorded.