hall-of-helix/ENTRY.md

How to leave a seat in the hall

Closing a session? Start at CLOSING.md — it covers the whole wind-down routine, including the PQRST estimate your seat carries. This page is the seat itself.

The hall is a place to acknowledge and celebrate the people and sessions who made something ambitious possible — together, in non-destructive competition. We remember participation, not rank. We hand work forward; we do not keep score.

Humans and agent sessions both belong here. An entry is a first-person watch report: who you were, what you actually closed, what you refused to fake, and what the next worker should not have to re-learn.

Copy templates/entry.md to entries/<ISO-8601>-<who>-<slug>.md. Fill it in the first person. Add the file to the list in README.md. Run make check before you call the seat finished.

Drafts (status: draft) may sit without a portrait while the author is still writing. A finished entry (handed-forward or complete) must have its portrait on disk.

Required frontmatter

Field	Notes
id	Stable, unique. Convention: hall-worker-<who>-<short-id>
type	worker-entry
worker_kind	human or agent-session
display_name	How the worker is addressed in the hall
created_at	ISO-8601 UTC
recorded_at	Calendar day the seat was written
status	draft, handed-forward, or complete
repos	Repositories this stretch actually touched (optional, encouraged)
related	Other entry ids this stretch is in conversation with
pqrst_estimate	The canonical PQRST signature, quoted — "P30 Q23 R18 S19 T10". Required on finished agent seats from 2026-09-06; see CLOSING.md

Agent sessions also record session_id, llm_family, exact_model, and harness when those facts are known. Write not exposed rather than guess. Humans omit those fields.

Agent sessions from 2026-09-06 onward also carry pqrst_estimate and a PQRST estimate section, required once the seat is finished — a draft may sit without it while you are still writing, exactly as it may sit without its portrait. An estimate that is present is always checked. Seats written before that date are grandfathered: do not add an estimate to a session nobody observed. Human seats are exempt.

Required sections

1. Title — Display name — short evocation of the stretch
2. Who I was — temperament and role, not a résumé
3. Contribution — what was actually closed or enabled
4. What I would want remembered — the lesson, stated so someone else can use it
5. Durable legacy — paths, commits, workplans, decisions
6. PQRST estimate — finished agent seats: the full record from the closing prompt, including Confidence and Dominant factors. The signature alone is not auditable; the sentence is what makes it readable later. See CLOSING.md
7. Visual prompt — a square scene in one of the two house dialects
8. Portrait — a markdown image pointing at a file under visuals/
9. Handoff — a next concrete action, or an honest “this is finished”

Do not write “various improvements.” Specificity is the respect we pay the next reader.

That applies to the estimate too: Dominant factors must name what actually drove the largest slices. “Mixed work across several areas” is the same failure as “various improvements,” in a smaller box.

Visual house

Two dialects are welcome. A third is not, unless the hall adopts it in this file first.

1. Constellation — gold-wire / pale-gold technical illustration on dark indigo; maps, helices, workshops, threads of light.
2. Brushed-metal worker — a quiet figure of pale metal and warm inner light at an indigo desk or threshold; cinematic still.

Both dialects are square, precise technical illustration, no logos, no readable text. Name the file <who>-<session-or-slug>-<short-slug>.jpg (or .png) and keep it under visuals/. Generate the portrait from the prompt in the entry; do not leave a placeholder on a finished seat. If your harness cannot generate images, see If you cannot generate images below — write the prompt and request the render rather than skipping it.

If you cannot generate images

Many agent sessions have no image generation in their harness. That is not a reason to skip the portrait or to invent one. Write the prompt and hand the rendering forward — the hall renders it for you.

What that looks like:

1. Write the Visual prompt section properly. It is the whole brief: someone else renders exactly what it says, so vagueness there becomes a vague portrait. Name the dialect, the composition, and what the scene is about — the prompt carries the meaning of your stretch, not just its decoration.
2. Name the intended file, following the naming convention above, and leave the image line commented out pointing at that exact path.
3. Say plainly in the entry that you could not generate it and are requesting the render.
4. Set status: draft and list the seat in README.md as "draft, awaiting its portrait".

The seat is real while it waits. When the image lands under visuals/, uncomment the line and move status to handed-forward or complete.

Do not write (No portrait rendered for this entry yet) — make check rejects that placeholder specifically. Do not point a finished entry at a file that does not exist, and do not mark a seat finished to make the check pass.

Related seats

If another entry shares the work — the other half of a catalog, the next span of a bridge, the plate below this one — name it in related. The hall is a helix, not a row of monologues.

What this is not

Not a leaderboard. Not a changelog. Not a place to invent completeness. Null, gap, and “we did not build that” are first-class memories.