The observations browser

mait-code observations is a full-screen, read-only window onto the raw extraction tier — everything the observe hook has pulled out of your sessions that reflection hasn't yet synthesised. Where How memory works explains the tiers and the memory browser shows the store as a whole, this is the place you audit the backlog: a tree of observations grouped by capture day on the left, each one flagged pending or reflected, the selected one rendered in full on the right.

Why it exists

The observe hook works silently: at compaction and session end it extracts facts, preferences, decisions and events into memory.db, and /reflect later distils them into insights. Between those two moments the raw tier used to be invisible — the home hub could say "awaiting 15 observations" but nothing could show you what those 15 things were. This browser is that missing drill-down: see what was captured, when, from which project, and what the next reflection will actually chew on.

It is deliberately read-only, like the memory browser. It never reflects, edits or deletes — synthesis stays with the /reflect skill, writing stays with the hook. The pending/reflected split is judged against the reflection watermark (the high-water mark /reflect advances), so what you see pending here is precisely what the next reflection run will consider.

The layout

Three regions, top to bottom:

• The masthead — the shared brand banner, labelled Observations, with the backlog folded into its subtitle (Observations — 12 pending of 87, plus the project scope and match count while filtering).
• The body — a filter box over a tree on the left, the detail pane (the wider share) on the right.
• The footer — the live key hints.

The tree groups observations by capture day, newest first. A day with anything pending opens expanded and carries a N pending badge in the warning colour; a fully-reflected day stays collapsed behind a dimmed count. Each leaf reads <marker> <type> <first line>: ● for pending, ✓ (dimmed) for reflected.

Reading an observation

Highlight a leaf and the detail pane renders it:

• a title — #<id> · <type>,
• a metadata line — captured <date> · importance <1–10> · scope <scope> · <pending reflection | reflected>,
• and the body, rendered as markdown (plain text is just a subset).

Highlight a day instead and the pane shows that day's capture sessions, read from the daily JSONL logs the hook also writes: when each capture ran, what triggered it (precompact, session-end), which project it came from, and how much it extracted per category. The database stays the source of truth — the logs only contribute this per-capture metadata, and a day without a log simply says so.

Narrowing the view

Press / to focus the filter and type: the tree narrows live to observations whose content matches (case-insensitive substring), every day expanding to show its hits.

Press p for the project filter — a dropdown of every project that has observations, exactly like the board's. Picking one narrows the tree to that project (plus global observations) and, importantly, judges pending/reflected against that project's own watermark, since reflection runs per-project.

Off the terminal

Like the other TUIs, mait-code observations only opens the browser on a TTY. Piped or redirected, it prints a day-grouped read-only summary instead — the pending tally first, then each day's entries with their markers.

Reference

Keys

Key	Action
↑ / ↓	Move the highlight; the detail pane follows
Enter / Space	Expand or collapse a day
/	Focus the filter
p	Filter by project
Esc	Back to the tree (from the filter/detail); quit (from the tree)
r	Re-read the store
?	Key cheat-sheet
Ctrl+P	Command palette (incl. theme switching)
q	Quit

See also

• How memory works — the tiers, extraction and reflection behind what you're auditing.
• The memory browser — the whole store, including what reflection has already produced.
• The review queue — working through the curated memories that have aged out.
• mc-tool-memory — reflect and friends (the synthesis this browser deliberately doesn't trigger).