The vault crossed the 50-note embedding threshold on 2026-07-06 — wire the local semantic-retrieval pass (Q3c)

Per the north star and RUN-QUEEN-LOOP Q3(c): the embedding layer wires at 50–100 notes, "never before — sequencing is the point." As of queen cycle 9, 30-notes/ holds 52 notes (48 claim-notes + 4 myth-notes). The threshold is crossed; the sequencing condition is met.

This is logged as a question, not built this cycle, for two honest reasons: (1) it is a Qwen/mechanical job per the north star (local-model era), and this session pivots to website work next — wiring it now would be a new workstream started at a stop boundary; (2) the retrieve-test noise this marathon has been logging (grep hits climbing to 6+ notes per query with no ranking) is exactly the signal the embedding layer exists to fix, so the need is demonstrated, not speculative.

What building it needs

• A local embedding model (Qwen or equivalent) over 30-notes/ + 40-mocs/
  • 40-entities/, additive alongside the markdown (SQLite + sqlite-vec or LanceDB per the 2026-07-01 handoff), NOT a rewrite of seek_research.py.
• The id/derived_from/connects_to fields already on notes are the join scaffolding.
• Gate retrieval on audit_status (operating spec §7) — the embedding index must carry the trust field so semantic hits inherit the same gate wikilink walks do.

For Cali

This is the north star's "24/7 volume sprint pays off" moment — the vault hit the threshold that makes semantic retrieval worth wiring. It is a clean next-workstream candidate for after the website pivot. Flagged, not started.

Sequencing ruling (Cali r.3, 2026-07-06)

Priority RAISED (peer survey confirmed peers ship retrieval layers — Agrici's hybrid BM25+cosine, Ghelbur's scored evals), but sequenced SECOND: the first vault-lint runs before the embedding pass, because an embedding index over unlinted notes serves unreconciled pairs faster (the north star's "confident wrong answer," accelerated). Lint findings feed question-consolidation-pass-vs-revisit-protocol; this builds immediately after.

Parts list verified at primary (2026-07-07, cycle 20 — capture 20260707-0205)

The lint precondition has since been met (cycle 12); the build is next in sequence, and its sketched parts all check out against their own maintainers' documentation:

• sqlite-vec — pure-C, dependency-free SQLite extension; vec0 virtual table, plain-SQL KNN (MATCH … ORDER BY distance LIMIT k); additive to an existing SQLite file, exactly matching this question's "additive alongside the markdown" constraint. Stable v0.1.0 2024-08-01.
• LanceDB — embedded/in-process alternative (Lance columnar format); vector + full-text + hybrid search, Python/Node/Rust. Same operational class as sqlite-vec; no source benchmarks the two at sub-1000-vector scale — if the build wants a number, it must measure, not cite.
• Qwen3-Embedding — 0.6B/4B/8B, dims 1024/2560/4096 (Matryoshka truncation supported), Ollama-distributed; 8B ranks No.1 on MTEB multilingual (70.58, 2025-06-05). The 0.6B is the plausible fit at vault scale; MTEB says nothing about n≈100 corpora — test locally.
• Retrieval-quality precedent — Anthropic's contextual-retrieval figures and the Agrici v1.7 pipeline built on them now have a citable home: claim-contextual-retrieval-failure-rate-figures. Design shape worth copying from Agrici: BM25 always-on and local; any API-calling enhancement consent-gated behind an explicit egress flag — congruent with the safety spec's no-unsupervised-egress posture.
• Unchanged internal constraint: the index must carry audit_status so semantic hits inherit the wikilink-walk trust gate.