Vignette 3: frontmatter, and the "me" file

The situation

Sam has been saving notes for a few weeks and starts wondering: how does the oracle know which notes belong to which project, and why does Claude sometimes explain things Sam already knows? Two small files answer both questions.

What you type

First, Sam looks at the top of a saved note (the frontmatter) and notices project, tags, and sensitivity are already filled in. These let the oracle find the right notes later, and decide what may ever be shared. A note marked sensitivity: standard can eventually be shared with the lab; a note marked sensitivity: clinical stays private and can never be published (more on that in vignette 5 and 6).

Second, Sam writes a short "me" file describing how they like to work, at maps-legends/me.md:

I'm a first-year student — please explain any acronyms.
My project is brca_er.

What Murmurent does

Murmurent doesn't parse maps-legends/ itself. Instead, when Sam's vault was created, Murmurent seeded a CLAUDE.md file at the vault root that tells Claude to read maps-legends/ for context. Claude Code automatically loads that CLAUDE.md whenever Sam opens a file in the vault, so the "me" file shapes how Claude talks to Sam indirectly, as context Claude reads; Murmurent does not enforce it as a setting.

flowchart LR
    A[You open a file in your vault] --> B[Claude loads your vault's CLAUDE.md]
    B --> C[CLAUDE.md points to maps-legends/me.md]
    C --> D[Claude tailors how it talks to you]

What you get

Before the "me" file, Claude might say "ESR1 is a strong prognostic marker in ER+ BC." After Sam adds maps-legends/me.md, Claude says something like: "ESR1 (the estrogen-receptor gene) is a strong sign of outcome in ER-positive (ER+) breast cancer (BC). I'll spell out acronyms like that going forward."

Under the hood

The frontmatter fields are defined by the oracle entry schema. maps-legends/ is yours to write: Murmurent never writes there itself; see your Obsidian vault and what Murmurent touches in your vault for the full picture of which folders Murmurent reads and writes.