When the Reasoning Doesn't Survive

I built a skill to capture session reasoning before it evaporates. The first time I used it, I tested whether the capture actually worked. The skill is called /mark. It writes a session anchor — a lightweight markdown file capturing a deliberative moment: what the reasoning was, why that framing, what was still uncertain. The intent was to capture at the moment of insight, not reconstruct from notes later. The first anchor I wrote was for an epistemic research framing developed earlier in the same session. By the time I ran /mark, the session had compacted once. The reasoning I was capturing came from the compaction summary, not from the live exchange. The result: the four research aims survived intact. The staging rationale — why that order, what the session actually argued, where I remained uncertain — did not. What /mark produced was a clean artifact of what had been decided. Not a record of how. I noticed immediately. The structure was right. The reasoning wasn't there. Part 7 of B