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OceanDB

The nightly playbook

The phases the Dreamer runs, in order, per workspace.

Ocean Labs

One run works a single workspace through a fixed sequence of phases. The Dreamer takes the workspace’s lease, runs the phases scoped to it, then releases. Here’s the shape of a run, at a readable altitude.

The phases

  • 0 · Open. Take the lease, read the watermark, and gather the entries captured since the last clean run.
  • 1 · Consolidate. Cluster the new entries by entity and topic, and upsert a page for each. Every fact written into a page cites the entry it came from, with a verbatim quote. Unfiled entries get routed to a project where one clearly fits; recurring tags get promoted to their own pages.
  • 2 · Cross-link. Draw relates and part_of edges between pages that belong together.
  • 2.5 · Personal cross-link. On a personal run only, weave private, one-way relates edges from a personal page to a related page in a shared space. Only you ever see these.
  • 3 · Contradictions. Where two pages conflict, open a contradicts proposal for you to resolve — it never picks a winner on its own.
  • 4 · Merge duplicates. Where two pages are the same thing, propose a merge. On your approval, the survivor inherits the loser’s projects and tags, and the loser is archived (never deleted).
  • 5 · Lint. Tidy up: mark long-unused pages stale, fold duplicate tags, normalize drifted labels, and dismiss any structurally broken edges.
  • 6 · Close. Write a short run record, release the lease, and advance the watermark — but only if the run was clean.

What you see afterward

Each run appends a row to the run log, which the dashboard renders as “what changed last night” — pages created and updated, links drawn, and anything surfaced for your review. See Dashboard overview.

Scheduling it

The Dreamer runs from your own agent. Point a scheduled task — a Claude Code schedule, a cron job, anything that can launch your agent — at a simple instruction:

Run the OceanDB dreamer: read the dreamer playbook and execute the phases, per workspace, against my OceanDB MCP.

Nightly is the natural cadence. Because every run is idempotent, an extra run never hurts.

For the one-command install and a ready cron line, see Run the Dreamer.