KB Astro: Start-here doors, the Map, ICS→Learning, Lora (2026-06-20)

A long localhost-driven session on the Astro llm-knowledge-base — home, the Constellation island, the Note layout, and the type system. Everything below is built and verified against a live preview. None of it is committed yet — the whole Astro replatform is still uncommitted (see Git reality at the end).

Home “Start here” — intent doors replace Trails

Replaced the .trails block in src/pages/index.astro with a “Start here” row of intent doors that route by intent (so it complements the hub columns instead of repeating them as topic doors). After weighing 3 vs 4 vs 5, settled on five — five lets the row cover all three hero domains. Titles are hooks drawn from each destination note, not the note’s name (Wedge’s steer: “Build the Factory” worked; the rest were re-mined). Final set:

• Understand → Build the Factory → The AI Industrial Revolution (the Naval roundtable).
• Apply → Raise the Floor → Vibe Coding.
• Learn → Self Correction → First Principles of Learning.
• Decode → 立 — Three Jobs, One Shape → How Chinese Characters Work (the fifth door; completes the language domain).
• Explore → Follow the Threads → the Map (/map/).

Colors ride DS tokens where they exist (--violet/--cool auto-lift in dark); Learn/Decode/Explore seed hex with a [data-theme=dark] override. Responsive 5→3→2.

Renamed: First Principles of ICS → First Principles of Learning

“ICS” (iCanStudy) reads as an opaque acronym on a public site. git mv’d the note, updated its H1 + prose self-reference, added an aliases: entry, and swept every backlink: 11 living wiki notes + notes/index.md got a full-name swap; journal entries got a path-only swap, so the dated prose stays historical. Verified — new slug builds, old slug gone, 0 broken .missing links.

Domain taxonomy — three misassignments fixed at the source

domains.json is generated by kb-astro/generate-site-data.mjs (assignDomain, folder-prefix based), so a few notes landed wrong. Added a small per-note override there (survives regeneration): The AI Industrial Revolution → agentic, Red Teaming → mind, Higher-Order Generativity vs Judgment → gen (matching the gen card’s own copy). Propagates to the graph, home, and the Map.

The Map (/map/) — the long one

Five rejected directions (six-domain clustered blobs → shaded hulls → cards → list) before the shape Wedge wanted: the full vault graph on top — real force-directed topology (hubs, spokes, inter-domain links) — mathematically clustered into six labeled domain regions. Kept the cross-domain edges (they carry the structure); moderate cluster pull so the links still shape each section instead of packing into balls; labels pushed to the outside (top-row above their cluster, bottom-row below) so a tall cluster like Generativity stops dropping its label into Language. Below the graph, a plain six-domain list, computed doctrine-first (hubs / condensed / syntheses lead, knowledge-pages only), so it stays current as the vault grows with no hand-list. The Constellation island gained a domainLabels mode for the clustering + outside labels; /domains/[domain] spoke pages back each section.

Nav + Explore

Folded the Map into the home Explore door, then put Map back as a top-nav item next to the logo. Final nav: Logos52 · Map · Notes · Projects · Journal · About.

Reading fixes

• One title per article. The Note layout renders the canonical title; the markdown body’s own title (.hub-page-title block or a leading # h1) is now hidden in src/layouts/Note.astro. No more double titles.
• About photo floats left at 1/3 width (aspect kept), text wraps around it; clearfix + a mobile fallback.

Font: Noto Serif TC → Lora

The serif --ming was Noto Serif TC, a CJK Song serif. It renders the curly apostrophe (U+2019, which markdown smartypants produces from a straight ') as a full-width glyph → a comical gap in “Naval’s”. Rather than patch it with font-variant-east-asian, moved body + headings to Lora (a Latin serif), with the Song serifs kept as fallback for stray 中文 / 立. Picked Lora from a six-serif mockup (Source Serif 4 · Newsreader · Spectral · Lora · EB Garamond · Literata).

Git reality (open)

The entire Astro site — src/, public/, kb-astro/, astro.config.ts, scripts/ — is uncommitted; HEAD is still the old Obsidian/Quartz vault (00 Command Center, index.md, .obsidian). So shipping any of today’s work to Pages means the first commit of the whole replatform, cutting logos52.github.io over from Quartz to Astro. Held for Wedge’s go on scope (full add -A vs. a curated set; what to do with untracked journal/brainstorm/ and the config/CI changes) before pushing.

Addendum — shipped, then a front-facing pass (2026-06-20, later)

Shipped: the whole replatform landed on main (6b1e07d) and logos52.github.io cut over from Quartz to Astro, live. The “Git reality” above is resolved. Standing call recorded: push all work; the only filter is private information — the guard (npm run guard) and the copy boundary (copy-public-notes.mjs + the private/ finances/ gitignore) enforce it.

A second pass followed:

• Top of mind replaced the open-questions / retrieval pulse and a short-lived “Currently” band. It carries open questions about where AI is going and how to shape it, for personal use and society: “What stays human as the models match generativity” (→ Higher-Order Generativity vs Judgment), “Where leaning on AI builds understanding” (→ Understanding Bottleneck), “If a generation offloads its thinking to AI, what are the second-order effects?”. Several now-page drafts were struck for self-narration.
• New standard, Open Questions Stay Open (02 - System/Writing Standards.md, under High-Signal Front-Facing): pose the question and stop. The appended conclusion breaks Details-Not-Conclusions; the reflexive AI-caution framing (atrophy, hollow out, protect) breaks No-Posing — model bias, off the wiki’s lanes.
• Front-facing lint, npm run lint:front (tools/scripts/lint-front-facing.mjs): checks titles, descriptions, h1s, ledes, and blurbs against the standard; reports, never rewrites. It caught the Map lede and the Projects “built around” line.
• Map: dropped the A-is-A lede; each of the six domains gained one concrete line. The graph centers on its center of gravity, and local note graphs got structure (a flatten force was smearing them onto one axis).
• Quartz out of the forward docs: About, README, and AGENTS now describe the Astro model (copy-public-notes.mjs + src/lib/ignore-patterns.mjs + the guard). Quartz stays only in dated journal entries.
• Surfaced, not reconciled: decisions/2026-06-11-engine-quartz-over-astro.md is reversed by the replatform (its recorded flip condition was met) and needs a superseded marker.