Fed my AI curation panel 20 candidates harvested from my project documentation. It rejected 17 outright and drafted 3 status reports no one would want to read. The panel wasn’t broken. The source was.
PKM folks know the cousin of this: fleeting vs. permanent notes. The twist from actually measuring it: an AI can’t distill a learning from reference notes at all, because they describe what things are. A learning is what happened — a bug that surprised, a belief that broke. State compresses to summary. Only events compress to lessons.
One run, n=20, one vault. Scope accordingly. But the fix was mechanical: denylist the reference layer (the project documentation notes), harvest the event layer (Daily Notes/2026-06-10.md, commits with reasoning, bug post-mortems). The single post that survived was written minutes after a live bug. That’s next.