Capture
Capture Quality
Decide what belongs in Origin: durable facts, decisions, lessons, gotchas, corrections, and project context.
At a glance
01
Good captures are durable, atomic, specific, and include why the fact matters.
02
Skip tool output, command logs, filler, temporary todos, and facts the repo can derive directly.
01
The capture test
Capture one durable memory when a future AI session would waste time rediscovering it or would make a worse decision without it.
The best captures name the project, tool, person, decision, or constraint and include the reason it matters. That gives retrieval enough surface area to find it later.
02
Good capture shapes
Origin works best when each memory carries one idea. One idea per capture makes deduplication, supersession, review, and page distillation easier.
Use capture for decisions, lessons, gotchas, preferences, project constraints, corrections, and durable facts about how work should continue.
Claude Code
/capture We chose source-backed pages because summaries need provenance.
/capture Supersedes earlier setup docs: Windows now uses a Task Scheduler ONLOGON task.
/capture Gotcha: Do not paste private memory contents into public issues.03
What to skip
Do not store raw command output, long logs, temporary todos, or facts that are already obvious from source files. Origin is the memory layer for durable work context, not a transcript archive.
If the source artifact is the authority, keep the capture short and point to the decision or lesson that a future agent should remember.
- Skip: full test output, stack traces, generated diffs, and tool logs.
- Skip: conversational filler, acknowledgements, and one-off status messages.
- Skip: repo facts an agent can read directly, unless the important part is why that fact matters.
04
Corrections and supersession
When a fact changes, capture the correction instead of silently editing history in your head. Name what it supersedes and why the new fact should replace the old one.
For sensitive or wrong records that should not remain at all, use /forget with the memory ID. Forget is destructive, so prefer correction when the history is still useful.
05
Review and distill
/review is for inspecting pending captures or revisions. /distill is for turning repeated clusters into readable pages.
Use review when trust is the question. Use distill when synthesis is the question.
Next
Review and Trust
Understand how Origin keeps uncertain memory visible: pending captures, revisions, contradictions, rejections, confirm, and forget.
Read next