Robert Tucker

I borrowed a friend's beat-up pickup to empty a storage unit, and drove a stick shift for the first time since 1993. Back in my automatic afterward, my attention wandered off inside 4 minutes. The truck never stopped telling me what it was doing, and that turned out to be the same thing two of my releases this summer were about: a tool that reports its state while the work happens.

The next-action field in a project's frontmatter is supposed to be an executable pointer, two or three lines. Mine grew to 5,600 characters — added to a little at a time by my own agent, every single addition reasonable — until it went stale a full day behind the log sitting right below it. Co-maintained systems fail in ways neither party produces alone.

My daily review ran clean against a version of my day that was hours out of date. The tool had handed back a path to the note instead of the note, and a path is an invitation to skip the read. v0.5 of para-vault-mcp is about freshness: make the tool defeat the cache instead of asking the caller to remember.

A find_project query returned an empty array, and the LLM confidently told the user they had nothing — while four projects sat invisible behind one line of unquoted YAML. v0.4 of para-vault-mcp is about silences: wrong-but-confident answers, and the review discipline that fixes them even below the public bar.