Session-report editorial preservation — parked 2026-05-15 EOD

DARE.CO.UK · PARKED SKETCH · 2026-05-18

Mirrored from ~/.claude/.../memory/project_session_report_editorial_preservation_parked.md. This is a design sketch parked for future build — read for context, not as a current deliverable.

Teach dare_session_report.py to preserve a manual editorial section between <!-- EDITORIAL --> / <!-- /EDITORIAL --> marker comments across re-runs, so the augmented-session-report pattern survives the driver regenerating the report multiple times per day. ~15 min Monday work.

Flagged 2026-05-15 5:08pm by Dan:

“Park the editorial-preservation tweak for monday.”

What needs building

~/bin/dare_session_report.py regenerates the daily session report from scratch each run. Today the report was regenerated twice during active work, and each re-run wiped the manual 4-chunk editorial section that had been added at the top. Currently the only way to keep editorial intact is “augment after every driver run, never re-run.”

The fix: marker-block preservation.

1. Before writing the new report, READ the existing one (if it exists)
2. Look for content between <!-- EDITORIAL --> and <!-- /EDITORIAL --> HTML comment markers
3. If found, splice that block back into the regenerated report at a fixed anchor point (e.g., right after TL;DR)
4. Markers are HTML-comment-safe in markdown, render invisibly, don’t show in the published HTML

Companion change: report template

Driver’s generated report should include the markers as empty placeholders by default:

�STASH6�

So future editorial sections always slot into the same location, the driver always preserves them, and a fresh-day report has the empty placeholder ready to fill.

Why this matters

Per feedback_augmented_session_report_pattern — the augmented session report (driver-spine + editorial-overlay) is the most-used artefact in the corpus, the daily TOC, the report Dan named “my favourite from every day.” Making it robust to re-runs makes the augmentation habit cheap to maintain.

On resume (Monday)

1. Patch ~/bin/dare_session_report.py build_report() (or wherever it generates the markdown)
2. Add a _load_existing_editorial(path) helper that returns the block-between-markers or empty
3. Splice into the new report after the TL;DR list, before the next ## section
4. Test by: write editorial, re-run driver, verify editorial survives
5. Update feedback_augmented_session_report_pattern memory with the new mechanism

Linked memories

• feedback_augmented_session_report_pattern — the pattern this preserves
• feedback_why_comments_at_decision_points — annotation discipline for the marker-block code
• user_compounding_signal_north_star — the session report is one of the compounding artefacts

The aphorism

A pattern only compounds if the substrate doesn’t fight it. Marker comments turn manual augmentation from “always re-augment” into “augment once, persist forever”.