Vignette 1: save a fact to your personal Oracle¶
The situation¶
Sam is looking at the sample table and notices that ESR1 (the estrogen-receptor gene, "ER") reads noticeably higher in the tumour samples than the normal ones. Sam wants to write this down before moving on, so it isn't forgotten by next week.
What you type¶
Sam states it in plain English to Claude Code:
"Remember that ESR1 looks high in several of my tumour samples: worth checking against ER status once the pathology data comes in. This is for my brca_er project."
What Murmurent does¶
- Claude Code hands the fact to the oracle agent.
- The oracle agent checks it has everything it needs: what the fact is, which project it belongs to, who observed it. If something is missing, it asks Sam instead of guessing.
- It writes a new note into Sam's vault, at
oracle/2026-07-16_esr1-high-in-tumour-samples.md. - It adds a one-line pointer to
oracle/MEMORY.md, the master index the oracle reads first every time, so the note is easy to find later. - The note is now sitting in Sam's vault, ready to be searched or recalled later.
flowchart LR
A[You, plain English] --> B[Oracle agent]
B --> C["new note in your vault (oracle/...md)"]
C --> D[murmurent vault sync]
D --> E[your private GitHub vault]
What you get¶
The note is a plain markdown file, sitting in Sam's vault:
---
title: ESR1 looks high in several tumour samples
date: 2026-07-16
project: brca_er
sensitivity: standard
tags: [esr1, breast-cancer, observation]
sources: ['@sam']
---
# ESR1 looks high in several tumour samples
While looking at the sample table, ESR1 (the estrogen-receptor gene)
read noticeably higher in the tumour samples than the normal ones.
Worth checking against ER status when the pathology data arrives.
It is already in Sam's Obsidian vault, so Sam can open Obsidian and see it there with no additional step.
To back it up to Sam's private GitHub vault, Sam runs one command in a terminal:
murmurent vault sync
This commits and pushes the new note (best-effort), and prints
something like committed: yes · pushed: yes. The oracle agent never
runs git itself: syncing is a deliberate, separate step that Sam
controls.
Under the hood
The six frontmatter fields above are required by the
oracle entry schema,
and the note uses Obsidian [[wikilinks]] (not plain markdown
links) so it shows up correctly in Obsidian's graph view. See the
oracle workflow for how saved entries can
later be recalled or published to the lab,
what Murmurent touches in your vault for
exactly which folders it reads and writes, and
setting up your personal vault for what
vault sync, vault info, and vault paths do day to day.