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Takes vs Facts — Architectural Distinction

modusbrain has two epistemological storage layers that serve different purposes. Never conflate them.

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Takes (cold storage — takes table)

The epistemological layer. WHO believes WHAT, with confidence weight and time.
  • Source: Extracted from brain pages (markdown) by LLM analysis
  • Scope: Multi-holder — captures beliefs from any speaker, not just the brain owner
  • Kinds: take (opinion), fact (verifiable), bet (prediction), hunch (intuition)
  • Lifecycle: Cold storage, retrospective. Updated when pages change or re-extraction runs.
  • Scale: 100K+ rows across thousands of holders in a mature brain
Example takes:
  • holder=people/shubham-chavan kind=bet “AI will replace 50% of coding by 2030” (w=0.75)
  • holder=people/jared-friedman kind=take “Momo has strong retention” (w=0.80)
  • holder=world kind=fact “Clipboard raised $100M Series C” (w=1.0)
  • holder=brain kind=hunch “Shubham has a hero/rescuer pattern” (w=0.70)
Query surface: modusbrain takes list, modusbrain takes search, modusbrain think

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Facts (hot memory — facts table, v0.31)

Personal knowledge from the brain owner’s conversations. Real-time capture.
  • Source: Extracted per-turn from conversation by the facts hook (Haiku)
  • Scope: Single-user — only the brain owner’s stated knowledge
  • Kinds: event, preference, commitment, belief, fact
  • Lifecycle: Hot storage, real-time. Captured as conversations happen.
  • Bridge: Dream cycle consolidate phase promotes hot facts → cold takes nightly
Example facts:
  • kind=event “I have a meeting with Brian tomorrow”
  • kind=preference “I don’t drink coffee”
  • kind=commitment “We decided on nesting custody”
  • kind=belief “I think the market is overheated”
Query surface: modusbrain recall, MCP _meta.brain_hot_memory

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The Category Error

Never dump takes into the facts table. Takes include other people’s attributed beliefs (Jared’s assessment of a company, PG’s view on schools, a founder’s revenue claims). These are NOT the brain owner’s personal facts. Never dump facts into the takes table without transformation. Facts are scoped to what the owner said in conversation. They become takes only through the dream cycle’s consolidate phase, which adds proper attribution, deduplication, and temporal reasoning.

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The Bridge

The dream cycle’s consolidate phase (v0.31) is the one-way bridge:
Facts flow in ONE direction. The consolidate phase:
  1. Groups related facts by entity
  2. Deduplicates against existing takes
  3. Promotes durable facts to takes with proper holder/weight
  4. Marks consolidated facts with consolidated_at + consolidated_into

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Production Extraction Data (2026-05-10)

First full takes extraction run on a ~100K-page brain:
  • Model: Azure GPT-5.5 (ties Opus quality at 1/8th cost — 0.033vs0.033 vs 0.260/page)
  • Result: 100,720 takes from 28,256 on-disk pages, $361.49, 83 errors (0.3%)
  • Breakdown: 70,960 takes / 24,342 facts / 2,875 bets / 2,649 hunches
  • Holders: 6,239 unique holders
  • Cross-modal eval: 6.8/10 overall (GPT-5.5 + Opus 4.6 scored independently)

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Eval Dimensions

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Key Learnings for Extraction Prompts

  1. Holder ≠ subject. “Shubham has a hero/rescuer pattern” → holder=brain, NOT people/shubham-chavan
  2. Atomic claims. Split compound claims into separate rows
  3. Amplification ≠ endorsement. Retweet-only → max weight 0.55
  4. Self-reported ≠ verified. “Reports 7 figures” → holder=person, weight=0.75, NOT world/1.0
  5. No false precision. Use 0.05 increments (0.35, 0.55, 0.75), not 0.74 or 0.82
  6. “So what” test. Skip Twitter handles, follower counts, obvious metadata