mempalace--mempalace/docs/authored-at.md

Authored date (authored_at)

Conversation transcripts carry a per-line ISO-8601 timestamp (both Claude Code and Codex JSONL). The miner records the most recent one per file as the drawer's authored_at — when the content was actually written.

This is distinct from the ingest date:

Field	Meaning
filed_at / result created_at	When the drawer was mined (written to the palace). A bulk re-mine collapses these to a single instant.
authored_at	When the underlying content was written, recovered from the transcript timestamps. Survives re-mining.

authored_at is surfaced in search results (and shown in the CLI search output), and is used as a deterministic tie-break in hybrid ranking: candidates with identical scores order with the more recently authored drawer first. Drawers without per-line timestamps (e.g. markdown) fall back to filed_at.

Backfilling existing memory

New mines populate authored_at automatically. Drawers mined before this feature only have filed_at. Re-mining does not fix them — the scanner skips files already mined at the current NORMALIZE_VERSION. Two options:

1. In-place backfill (recommended — no re-embedding). scripts/backfill_authored_at.py reads each convos drawer's source transcript and updates only the authored_at metadata. Idempotent and safe to re-run; embeddings are untouched.

   python scripts/backfill_authored_at.py \
       --palace ~/.mempalace/palace \
       --sessions ~/.claude --sessions ~/.codex          # dry run
   python scripts/backfill_authored_at.py \
       --palace ~/.mempalace/palace \
       --sessions ~/.claude --sessions ~/.codex --apply  # write
   

   For the Docker MCP image, mount the volume and session dirs read-only — see the header of scripts/backfill_authored_at.py for the exact docker run invocation.

   Back up first: tar czf palace-backup.tgz -C <palace-dir> . (or snapshot the mempalace-data volume).

2. Drop and recreate. Delete the affected drawers and re-mine the transcripts; the fresh mine stamps authored_at. Simpler, but re-embeds everything.