Import chat history

Chat history is the most underrated source a person owns and the most sensitive. It records their reasoning, not just facts, and it also records things they would not want in a file that gets synced, committed and backed up.

Core rule

Privacy pass before triage, triage before ingestion. Never ingest an export wholesale.

Workflow

1. Convert with scripts/chat_export_to_md.py into one file per conversation, filtering out short exchanges.
2. Privacy pass. List conversations touching health, money, other people's private information, or confidential work. The user decides; you delete nothing on your own.
3. Triage the rest into three piles: worth ingesting (they worked something out, decided something, or got an explanation that landed), worth archiving in raw/, and delete.
4. Report the lists. Move nothing yet.
5. On approval, ingest the first pile, with the instruction that these are the user's own thinking: build pages around what they were working out and what they concluded, not around the assistant's explanations.

Output format

Converted: <n> conversations (<n> skipped as too short)

Privacy review needed: <n>
  <title> - <why>

Worth ingesting: <n>
  <title> - <what it worked out>

Archive only: <n>
Delete suggested: <n>

Calibration

Expect roughly nine in ten conversations to be throwaway lookups. A triage that recommends ingesting most of the export has not filtered.

Record dates on every page. A position from two years ago is not a current belief, and the vault has to be able to tell the difference.